KV Duong

TOO FOREIGN FOR HOME, TOO FOREIGN FOR HERE
2 April to 29 May, 2022

Migration Museum
Lewisham Shopping Centre
London SE13 7HB

"As he throws himself into the force of time, projecting forward to another state, the artist hopes to embody an experience both real and imagined, remembered and invented. The recent performance makes a move from the narrative of past, migration, family, and queer history, to offer layers of approach to the ability of the museum to bring current and past together in the same place." [Full write-up below]

Sacha Craddock (Art critic, writer, and curator)

PDF exhibition catalog & pricing available below:

I was born in Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam in 1980 and migrated to London in 2010. I grew up in Canada to Chinese Vietnamese parents displaced by the Vietnam War. In my work I explore themes of migration and cultural assimilation, through a re-examination of my parents’ and my own experiences. I am a self-taught artist with a background in structural engineering.

 The central piece Resurrection is a live body painting performance about my family’s journey from Vietnam. My father was drafted to the war but was thankfully dismissed because of his glaucoma. My mother was shot in the hand while carrying her sister and fleeing their home. My aunts were boat people who made it to Canada via the Bidong island refugee camp. The burning of paper in the performance refers to the Buddhist philosophy of burning joss paper to pay homage to our ancestors. Resurrection was performed at the APT Gallery in Deptford last summer.

In Family Portraits, foreground images of my British work visa and portraits of my family and siblings are overlaid on top of an aerial view of a refugee camp. The facial features are deliberately blurred to present a universal experience of migrants.

In the sculptures, small-scale building blocks are precariously balanced to portray the experience of new immigrants living in a foreign country.

In Classroom, a historic background of the Lewisham high street in overlaid with children’s school desks. Between 1975 and the 1990s, around 22,000 Vietnamese refugees resettled in Britain, principally in London and clustered in Hackney, Deptford, and Lewisham.

Supported by Lewisham's Creative Enterprise Zone and SHAPES Lewisham

Sacha Craddock - Critical Writing

The window, at the Migration Museum sets the scene, with footage of past performance, detritus from a particular performance rendered artistic fact, and three-dimensional works with overlaid photographs. KV Duong responds to the notion of the Museum by showing evidence of past as well as more recent work. Such an approach to work, viewed collectively here through glass at a shopping centre, is a subtle reminder of the way that actual, as well as artistic, experience will be so inevitably mediated. A shift between the personal and the general, between a hands-off and a hands-on approach, re-enforces the sense that people forced across the world, as well as those displaced much closer to home, cannot help but be the embodiment of the impossibility of cherishing, and transmitting, first-hand experience. The idea of belonging, of having belongings, means that KV Duong as an artist is able to deftly approach the past with questions about what he remembers and the way that such a memory can be received.

The question is also how precise, exact, and important individual experience might be to a collective sense of national trauma washed up, washed over, and perhaps over generalised. Dealing with the movement of people dispersed, in such danger, from Vietnam to many parts of the world, the work also displays many layers of a fixed state. The image of Duong’s family, for instance, melds with an image from a more collective and general past. And the artist places himself in the middle of performance which is here, at times, manifested by footage, as well as burnt paper, which in turn mirrors the burning of joss paper in Buddhist ceremonies as well as the evidence and detritus of the original performance. The narrative, which has imploded, brings a combination of heightened pressure as well as the different sort of time that is always suggested by the museum display. By showing evidence of evidence, Duong sometimes takes himself out of himself to an extreme.  By being the centralising force of such artistic activity, however, he hopes to be able ‘re-live a gut instinct at the moment’. As he throws himself into the force of time, projecting forward to another state, the artist hopes to embody an experience both real and imagined, remembered and invented. The recent performance makes a move from the narrative of past, migration, family, and queer history, to offer layers of approach to the ability of the museum to bring current and past together in the same place. 

Copyright Sacha Craddock, April 2022.

Sacha Craddock is an independent art critic, writer & curator based in London. She was Chair of the Board of New Contemporaries and selection process from 1996 until December 2021. Craddock is co-founder of Artschool Palestine, co-founder or the Contemporary Art Award and council member of the Abbey Awards in Painting at the British School at Rome, Trustee of the Shelagh Cluett Trust, and President of the International Association of Art Critics AICA UK.