Identity IV: Migration Painting

KV Duong (b. 1980 Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam) is a London-based artist who examines the complexities of the Vietnamese queer identity through painting, performance, sculpture, and installation. Duong grew up in Canada to Chinese Vietnamese parents displaced by the Vietnam War. In his work he explores themes of migration and cultural assimilation through the lens of his personal and familial history. War trauma and integration correlate with the artist’s coming out as a gay Asian man. By employing found objects and materials of personal significance, historic Vietnam War images and documentation, and his own body painting images, Duong constructs imagined landscapes that offer a glimpse into this personal cultural heritage. 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 distorted to generate a tension between the object and subject relation, underscoring the complexity of the artist's process and approach to his subject matter. Duong is a self-taught artist with a Master’s in Structural Engineering. He is a recent recipient of funding from Arts Council of England National Lottery Project Grants (2023) and Jerwood Arts New Work Fund (2023). 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. He will co-curate and lead a collaborative exhibition titled No Place Like Home scheduled for presentation at the Museum of The Home in spring 2023.