Reception: Saturday, 30 August, 5-7pm

Dates: Wednesday, 03 September - Sunday, 14 September, 2025

Hours: 10:00 - 18:00 daily; registration highly encouraged; closure 30 August to 2 September

Registration link: https://forms.gle/XZ8H2cm4q17woua29

Location: VAC Hanoi, 6/44/11 To Ngoc Van, Tay Ho, Hanoi

Vietnam Art Collection (VAC) is delighted to present the Open Studio of our Summer 2025 artist-in-residence, KV Duong, offering a glimpse into his ongoing practice and the beginning of a new body of work developed during his residency at VAC Hanoi.

Welcome home — on this, the 50th anniversary of reunification and the 80th anniversary of the declaration of independence from France.

What does home mean for those of the diaspora returning, for those whose homes were displaced or destroyed during past hardship, or for those whose sexuality are unwelcomed at home? Home is a layered idea. It can be a physical space, a childhood memory, or an atmosphere — the smell of a home-cooked meal, the echo of children’s voices. To return is rarely simple — it is a journey charged with memory, emotion, and nuance.

In the main exhibition room, visitors encounter a suspended set of children’s chairs and a table, hovering above the floor — memory suspended, grounding made ambivalent. On one side stands a deconstructed wooden door inscribed with Vietnamese, Chinese, and English text, hinting at the multiplicity of the artist's ethnicity and cultural influences; on the other hang portraits of children, specifically the artist’s siblings. The artist intervenes the found table set and door with latex panels cast into their structures, replacing the original surfaces. Once functional, familiar, and familial, these objects now carry new meanings through the symbolism of latex, evoking both colonial material history and LGBTQ+ culture.

In the second room, the artist reconstructs the site of a bomb crater — remnants of U.S. bombing more than fifty years ago. These scars of war, reclaimed by nature, have become bomb ponds. Here, the site-specific installation stages an immersive environment marked by both destruction and renewal — a place where memory, resilience, and healing converge.

Sophie Huang, Director of VAC, comments, The notion of home is as relevant as ever in an increasingly turbulent and fragmented global society. For Vietnam, where peace has prevailed for the past half century, reunification and kinship remain central to public discussion. Welcome Home weaves these past stories together in a way that is both moving and thought-provoking, and I can’t wait to hear what our audiences will say.

About The Artist

KV (Kiên Vinh 建 榮) Duong (b.1980 Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam) is an ethnically Chinese artist with a transnational background - born in Vietnam, raised in Canada, and now living and working in the UK. His work explores migration and cultural assimilation through personal and ancestral histories.

KV’s paintings forgo more traditional materials of canvas or linen in favour of latex, which is poured onto a foam core board, then dried, painted, stretched and resin-fibreglass coated on the reverse. As a medium, latex bears fetishistic and sensuous connotations, particularly in conversation with queer identity politics, evoking sexual fantasy and intimacy. Yet it is also connected with the rubber industry, referencing the history of rubber plantations under French colonial rule in Vietnam, which lasted from 1887 until 1954.

Recent exhibitions include ‘An Uncommon Thread’ (Hauser & Wirth, Somerset UK, 2025), ‘Portals’ (Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, West Palm Beach USA, 2025), ‘Between This Body and the World’ (Harlesden High Street, London UK, 2024), ‘No Place Like Home’ (Museum of The Home, London UK, 2023), and ‘Too Foreign for Home, Too Foreign for Here’ (Migration Museum, London UK, 2022).

KV is represented by Pippy Houldsworth Gallery and is scheduled to show in their group booths at Frieze London and Art Basel Miami coming up this autumn.