The Spaces Between Identity and Belonging
For London-based artist KV Duong, the idea of home has never been confined to a single country. Born in Vietnam, raised in Canada and now living in Britain, his experiences of migration, cultural identity and queer life have shaped a practice that brings together painting, performance, photography and installation.
Latex has become one of his most distinctive materials. Its associations with the body and sexuality sit alongside a more troubling history, that of rubber production under French colonial rule in Vietnam. Duong works directly onto its surface using brushes, unconventional tools and his own body, creating paintings that carry the physical traces of their making. Doors, windows and portals frequently appear in his work, reflecting ideas of access, exclusion and the boundaries that shape our understanding of belonging.
A former structural engineer who went on to study painting at the Royal College of Art, Duong has experienced a remarkable period of development. Following his participation in An Uncommon Thread at Hauser & Wirth Somerset in 2025, he presented his first solo exhibition with Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, Where Wound Becomes Water, in early 2026. His work has also featured at Frieze London and in exhibitions in Venice and New York.
In this interview, Duong discusses the physical demands of working with latex, the influence of his Vietnamese heritage, the unexpected role of his engineering background and the experiences that have shaped his journey as an artist.
KV Duong header image courtesy of Brave Projects and James Champion
You were born in Vietnam, raised in Canada and now live and work in Britain. How has moving between those different places shaped the way you think about belonging and identity within your work?
Diasporic identity is complex and layered. Before becoming a naturalised British citizen, I would tick ‘Other Asian’ on UK immigration forms, as none of the prescribed categories adequately captured my identity. I belong, in some ways, to the broader East and Southeast Asian community, yet no single category fully defines me.
London is home. I feel British, though not necessarily English. I return regularly to Canada to visit family, while Vietnam remains my motherland, a place of refuge, renewal and artistic inspiration.
Through Salman Rushdie’s writings, I came to understand that the diasporic experience is no less authentic than that of someone who has lived their entire life in their ancestral homeland. There is no singular way of belonging to a race, ethnicity or nation. Identity encompasses a multiplicity of histories, experiences and relationships to place.
Latex has become central to your practice, both for its physical qualities and its connections to queer eroticism and the history of rubber production in colonial Vietnam. When did you realise it could carry so many different meanings at once?
Before starting my MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art in September 2023, I spent the summer researching various industries in Vietnam, including rice, tea, coffee, metal and rubber, the latter being the source of latex, which is extracted from the rubber tree. I was already familiar with the pioneering use of latex by artists such as Eva Hesse and Heidi Bucher, so I recognised its artistic potential. I was particularly drawn to latex because of its connections, as mentioned, to my personal and ancestral histories. The challenge was figuring out how to work with the material and make it my own.
Latex is a temperamental and fragile material, and working with it has tested all my problem-solving skills. I spent the first three to four months experimenting with small samples, combining latex with different fabrics and papers, without knowing whether it could become a viable artistic medium. Through extensive experimentation, I eventually developed a process of reinforcing the back with fibreglass mesh and resin, giving the material much greater structural integrity. It was a leap of faith, but thankfully one that seems to be paying off.
Your process is extremely physical, involving brushes, your body, hair, chopsticks, broomsticks, steel wool and even your feet. What does working with the whole body give you that a more conventional painting process cannot?
Using my body as a painting tool is an extension of my live body-painting performances, which I’ve been doing since 2017. There’s something incredibly freeing about the process, and I think that sense of movement and spontaneity comes through in the marks. Using different parts of my body, from fingernails, forearms and palms to my thighs and the soles of my feet, creates a wide range of textures and gestures that simply can’t be replicated with conventional painting tools.
The skin-like quality of latex allows my own skin to glide across its surface, making the process very physical and intimate. I’m naturally quite a warm and personable person, so in many ways, this physical approach to painting feels like an extension of my personality. For more figurative works, I also use brushes.
I should mention that the entire production process of the panels involves a great amount of physical floor work, from pouring and stretching the latex onto frames to applying fibreglass and resin. It’s no joke! I actually developed lower back pain, which led me to seek help from several physiotherapists who helped me improve my core strength.
Subtraction seems to be just as important as application in your work, with surfaces scratched, removed and worked back into. Do you think of that process as a form of excavation?
It wasn’t my intention to consciously think about excavation, although perhaps there’s a psychoanalytic explanation for what I’m doing. Painting on a slippery surface like latex comes with its challenges, but it also offers unique possibilities. Its smoothness makes it easier to remove paint, allowing me to create precise, hard-edged marks through scratching and abrasion.
Returning to the idea of excavation, I suppose I am also mining the rich cultural histories of Vietnam and LGBTQ+ communities, uncovering narratives that have often been overlooked, suppressed or erased. The continual process of applying and removing paint becomes a metaphor for how an othered person navigates the world, whether as an immigrant or someone who exists outside heteronormative society. There is a constant negotiation between visibility and concealment, belonging and exclusion.
Your structural engineering background still enters the work through the resin-fibreglass backing and the way you construct the pieces. Has engineering become less of a previous career and more another language within your practice?
I definitely don’t miss my previous career at all! Becoming a full-time artist was the fulfilment of a lifelong dream, and it felt like a natural fit from the very beginning. That said, 19 years in the industry, alongside six years of education, have undoubtedly shaped the way I think and work. My technical background has strengthened my ability to solve problems, develop ideas and bring them to fruition. It has also given me a certain clarity and discipline in planning and executing projects, as well as the confidence to articulate and communicate the thinking behind my work. I see these as valuable skills that complement the more intuitive, spontaneous and experimental aspects of my artistic practice.
Doors and portals recur throughout your work as symbols of access and exclusion. What first made that architectural form feel so closely connected to both queer and postcolonial experience?
The eureka moment came in December 2023, a few months into my MA programme. I was making small, vertical rectangular latex coupons, which I had taped along my studio wall. During a tutorial, one of my tutors asked whether I was making miniature doors or portals. That observation completely shifted my perspective. Rather than seeing abstract pieces of fabric, I suddenly saw portals into another world, my world. I realised that I could use these portals to channel all the themes I had been thinking about over the past decade.
From there, I began exploring scale and architecture more intentionally, progressing from cabinet-sized doors to full-sized domestic doors. When hung on a wall, the panels can also resemble bay windows. Whether doors or windows, they act as portals into my world, but equally into the viewers’ own worlds.
Your 2026 exhibition Where Wound Becomes Water imagined the domestic environment of a Vietnamese-British family in London, based partly on the life you might have had if your family had migrated to Britain rather than Canada. What was it like creating an exhibition around an alternative version of your own history?
It was actually quite straightforward. There is a wonderful display of a British-Vietnamese immigrant family home from the 1980s at the Museum of the Home, and it looks remarkably similar to the homes I grew up in in Toronto. There are so many familiar details, from cling film wrapped around remote controls and aluminium foil covering stovetops to oversized skirting boards, sometimes made from floor panelling. Immigrant families made do with whatever affordable materials they could find to furnish and adapt their homes. And of course, there are all the Vietnamese cultural references scattered throughout, from food packaging and family photographs to free calendars given out by grocery stores.
It was a fun and nostalgic experience, bringing back memories of growing up and the time I spent with my family during my childhood.
The Bomb Pond series transforms sites of wartime violence into landscapes where nature has reclaimed the damage. Are you interested in those ponds because they hold destruction and regeneration simultaneously?
I’m interested in the power of an image and how an alluring picture can capture someone’s attention, first seducing the viewer with its visual appeal, then confronting them with the context and intentions behind the work. The art I’m personally drawn to often does exactly that, and it’s something I try to achieve in my own practice.
Specifically, the bomb ponds are bodies of water that have formed in bomb craters left by aerial bombardment during the Vietnam War. Over time, these craters have filled with rainwater and become absorbed into the surrounding landscape, appearing almost like natural ponds. I paint them in a traditional landscape format, with a foreground, background and sky. However, the colours create a sense of ambiguity, making it difficult to determine the time of day or even the location. It’s this interplay between presence and absence, beauty and violence, that I hope draws viewers in. I want them to come closer, examine the mark-making and ultimately question why the artist has chosen to paint this particular subject.
Your work increasingly moves between painting, installation, photography and performance. Do you still think of painting as the centre of your practice, or has the wider environment around the work become equally important?
I’ve always considered myself an artist who begins with an idea, then chooses whichever medium best brings it to life. Of course, the economic realities of living and working in London mean that paintings, or works that hang on walls, are more practical in terms of sales, storage and transport. They also allow me to build a core group of patrons who will hopefully support my wider practice as I expand into more ambitious sculptural and installation works.
I’ve been making performances for over a decade. While they’ve never resulted directly in sales, they form an important part of my artistic identity and the direction I want my practice to take. The same applies to my installations, many of which currently exist as digital renders that I hope to realise when the right opportunities arise.
Moving between painting, sculpture, performance and photography has always felt natural to me. As a largely self-taught artist, I’ve spent years experimenting with different media. My MA in Painting greatly strengthened my technical skills and critical understanding of the medium, but perhaps the most important lesson was recognising that the ideas have always come from within. They were there all along. In some ways, I think a certain naivety or lack of self-awareness has worked in my favour, giving me the freedom to experiment without overthinking or questioning whether I should. I’ve always trusted my instincts and followed wherever they take me.
In some works, images of you and your partner become blurred enough that race and gender are difficult to read. What interests you about allowing intimacy to remain visible while identity becomes less fixed?
There’s a delicate balance between being vulnerable and inviting viewers into the more intimate parts of my life, while leaving enough openness in the work for them to bring their own experiences and interpretations. Some of my photographic works are more specific because I feel it’s important to reveal the identity of the subject, while others are deliberately more discreet. I’m not sure there’s a right or wrong approach, but this tension between revealing and withholding is something I’m constantly navigating as I create an image.
Over the last few years, your work has appeared in increasingly significant contexts, including Frieze, Hauser & Wirth, Venice and your first solo exhibition with Pippy Houldsworth. Was there one of those moments that felt like a genuine shift in how you saw your own practice or how the wider art world was responding to it?
Without a doubt, the group exhibition at Hauser & Wirth Somerset was the defining moment in my young artistic practice. If someone had told me that just six months after graduating from my MA, I would be exhibiting with one of the world’s leading galleries, I would have found it absolutely unfathomable. It was the greatest launchpad any emerging artist could hope for.
Working with latex, an unconventional material that sparks curiosity and intrigue, I sensed that many buyers were interested in my work but were waiting for a degree of institutional recognition. The exhibition at Hauser & Wirth, and the opportunity to present my work alongside my peers, provided that crucial context and visibility. It generated momentum that led to my representation by Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, followed by other significant milestones, including Frieze London, Venice and my debut solo exhibition with Pippy.
I believe one of the most important things about being an artist is showing up with intention and consistency every day, whether in the studio, at an opening or in how you engage with people. It’s about bringing the best version of yourself to each moment. These small, incremental steps eventually lead to bigger breakthroughs.
Although the Hauser & Wirth exhibition might appear to have been an overnight success, the conversation actually began at my MA degree show eight months earlier, followed by months of correspondence and meetings. When the opportunity finally materialised, I had to produce the strongest body of work I was capable of, while juggling part-time work as a structural engineer.
I think it’s important to acknowledge the work and uncertainty behind these moments. What appears to be a sudden breakthrough is often the result of sustained effort, persistence and a willingness to make the most of an opportunity when it arises.
12. After such a significant period of development, what feels most urgent for you to explore next?
There are exciting developments underway in the studio, including new works incorporating metal bed frames and ambitious installations that blur the boundaries between painting, sculpture and architecture.
I’ve been fortunate to see growing interest in my work within the commercial gallery landscape, and I hope to build on this through opportunities for institutional solo exhibitions, meaningful dialogue with museum curators and, eventually, acquisitions by public collections. I would welcome the institutional support, critical engagement and visibility that would enable me to realise projects at a scale that matches my artistic ambition.
Dream big. Stay humble.
Artist links
Website: kvduong.com
Instagram: @kvduongart
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