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 — even hair follicles — sometimes in live performance. Using sponges, chopsticks, or Vietnamese broomsticks, I work acrylic paint across both sides of the latex, scratching with fingers, toes, steel wool, or a knife. The subtraction of layers is as important as the application.

Pungent liquid latex is poured onto a wooden board or concrete floor, then dried, stretched over door-shaped frames, and painted. I reinforce the back with a resin–fibreglass composite, informed by my structural engineering background and early fibreglass–concrete canoe experiments at university. 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.

In the Bomb Pond series, inspired by Vandy Rattana’s photographs, I trace the scars of bomb craters from the Vietnam War, now transformed into ponds. These sites reveal Mother Nature’s quiet reclamation and the resilience of the land and its people—my people—woven into our collective memory. Beneath their seemingly tranquil surfaces, a corporeal glow seeps through, hinting at a violent and eerie past. 

In the Untitled body painting series, the contact between skin and latex is raw and immediate. Painting with my body becomes an intimate release and an emotional dialogue, each performance revealing how movement, pressure, and speed shape my marks. The process blurs intention and instinct, an evolving exchange with environment and audience. The paint chills my skin, slick against the latex; I slide, glide, push, and scrape, testing the shifting boundary between control and surrender.

In the Soulmate Lovers series, I use self-timed photographs of my partner and I, taken during the height of the 2020 COVID lockdown—a time of heightened emotion both personally and globally. The figures are deliberately blurred to obscure markers of race and gender. At times, the viewer peers into a moment of private intimacy; at others, the gaze is returned, turning the voyeur into the voyeured.