STATEMENT

KV Duong (b.1980 Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam)

I was born in Vietnam, raised in Canada, and now live and work in the UK. I make paintings on latex about the Vietnamese diasporic queer experience drawing on personal and ancestral histories. I paint with both brush and body — including hair follicles — sometimes in live performance. Using sponges, chopsticks, and a Vietnamese broomstick, I work acrylic paint across both sides of the latex, scratching with my fingers, toes, steel wool, and a knife. The subtraction of layers is as important as their application.

Pungent liquid latex is poured onto a wooden board, then dried, stretched over door-shaped frames, and painted. I reinforce the back with a resin–fibreglass composite, informed by my structural engineering background. The luminous yellow surface pulls you in; its scent, fleshy texture, and tension hold you close. Latex evokes queer eroticism while recalling the rubber plantations of French colonial Vietnam.

Motifs of doors and portals recur — spaces of access and exclusion — reflecting both LGBTQ+ and postcolonial narratives. Across performance, photography, and painting, I trace how bodies, materials, and memory intertwine, revealing what endures beneath the surface.

Across my work, landscapes based on historic photographs of Vietnam and contemporary images of sites shaped by wartime histories sit alongside the body as vessels of memory, intimacy, and transformation. In the Bomb Pond series, inspired by Vandy Rattana’s photographs, Vietnam War bomb craters transformed into ponds reveal nature’s reclamation of violent histories. In the abstract body-painting series, I use my body directly on latex, allowing movement, pressure, and instinct to shape the marks. The contact between skin and latex is raw and immediate. In other works featuring self-portraits of my partner and me, the blurred images often obscure race and gender, shifting between intimacy and voyeurism. Across these works, bodies and landscapes hold traces of personal and collective histories.