KV Duong was born in Vietnam, raised in Canada, and now lives and works in the UK. He makes paintings on latex about the Vietnamese diasporic queer experience drawing on personal and ancestral histories. Latex evokes queer eroticism while recalling the rubber plantations of French colonial Vietnam. Across performance, photography, and painting, he traces how bodies, materials, and memory intertwine, revealing what endures beneath the surface.

In the metal bed series, the bed frame evokes institutional settings such as hospitals and makeshift refugee camps, as well as sites of queer encounter. These spaces are defined by transience, suspended between vulnerability and control. The solitary frame suggests isolation while also marking the bed as a site where private experience unfolds within broader systems of regulation and care.

Central to the work is the tension between soft, yielding latex and cold, rigid metal. In some works, figures introduce the body directly. Folded inward or entwined, they foreground tenderness and emotional vulnerability within masculinity. Moments of holding, rest, and introspection suggest the body as both protected and exposed. The bed frame acts as both portal and architectural structure, situating the body within systems of containment while opening onto a psychological and spatial elsewhere. 

Recent exhibitions include ‘Where Wound Becomes Water’ (Pippy Houldsworth, 2026), ‘Open Wound’ (Palazzo Nani Bernardo, Venice, 2026),  'An Uncommon Thread' (Hauser & Wirth, Somerset, 2025), 'Welcome Home' (VAC Residency, Hanoi, 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). 

Upcoming exhibitions include ‘Never the Same River: Movement, Migration, Media’ (Ford Foundation, New York, 2026), ‘The Unhomely’ (The Brampton Museum, Newcastle-under-Lyme, 2026). 

He/Him

@kvduongart

Photo courtesy of Brave Projects and James Champion