KV Duong is a London-based artist who examines the Vietnamese (queer) identity through painting, performance, sculpture, and installation. Duong grew up in Canada with Chinese Vietnamese parents displaced by the Vietnam War.  In his work, he explores themes of migration and cultural assimilation, through a re-examination of his parents’ and his own experiences. War trauma and integration correlate with the artist’s coming out as a gay Asian man.  

 Duong creates imagined landscapes using various media such as historic Vietnam War images and documentation, his own body painting images, and found objects and materials that have personal significance. He retells a history that has been distorted through media censorship and displaced through passed-on experiences, and in so doing suggests a new psychological reality.   

The material surface is corrupted—ripped, scratched, painted over—to disrupt any simple representation. The traumatised surface of the final work responds to conflict and the altered effects of the original events of war migration and suppression of speech. In some works, perspective and scale are warped to create tension between the object and subject relation.  

Duong is a self-taught artist with a Masters in Structural Engineering. He is a recent recipient of funding from Arts Council of England, Jerwood Arts, and a-n. Duong has contributed to several juried competitions including Derwent Art Prize (2016), Discerning Eye (2020), Royal Cambrian (2021, 2022) & Royal Ulster Academy Open (2021), Barbican Arts Group Trust Open (2021), BBC’s Royal Academy Summer Exhibition Programme (2019) and Sky Landscape Artist of the Year (2022). Duong presented his first institutional solo exhibition at the Migration Museum in spring 2022.