KV Duong
b.1980 Ho Chi Minh City
KV Duong is an ethnically Chinese artist with a transnational background—born in Vietnam, raised in Canada, and now living as a queer person in Britain. He paints, sculpts, builds installations, and performs, all centred around form and materiality in response to his lived experiences.
KV creates work on latex, highlighting its historical connection to French colonial rubber plantations in Vietnam, while simultaneously embracing its sensuality and symbolic association with the queer experience. The recurring motif of a door or portal signifies access and the limitations imposed by societal constructs, particularly those associated with colonial and LGBTQ+ histories.
Where present, the crossbars, in relation to the transparency of latex, serve as spatial delineation points, creating divisions between interior and exterior. He aims to critique power dynamics and access to interrogate the nation itself as both form and crucible for identity formation. The febrile context of growing tensions between different ethnicities and nations is of particular focus in my work.
Recent exhibitions include 'An Uncommon Thread' (Hauser & Wirth, Somerset, 2025), 'Between This Body and the World' (Harlesden High Street, 2024), 'No Place Like Home' (Museum of The Home, 2023), and 'Too Foreign for Home, Too Foreign for Here' (Migration Museum, 2022).
He/Him
Photo courtesy of Brave Projects and James Champion
Lovers (Study - Steel) no3, 2025
Lovers (Study - Steel) no3, 2025
Acrylic and ink on latex (resin-fibreglass backing), aluminium and steel frame
100 x 40 x 5 cm (x 2)
Photo courtesy of KV Duong and Pippy Houldsworth Gallery