TOO FOREIGN FOR HOME, TOO FOREIGN FOR HERE: Solo Exhibition
by KV Duong
Bottom row left to right: KV, brother, grandma, sister
Top row left to right: Aunt, dad, mum
2 April to 29 May, 2022
Migration Museum
London SE13 7HB
Too foreign for home, too foreign for here. It’s a familiar feeling that resonates with a lot of immigrants, particularly of Asian descent.
My name is KV (Kien Vinh) Duong. KV is the shortened anglicised form that I’ve used personally and professionally for the past 15 years. Kien Vinh is my Vietnamese name which has a direct Chinese translation (建 榮).
My family and I are ethnically Chinese people born in Vietnam. I would describe my childhood in Vietnam as idyllic. However, as an adult (and even though we weren’t well off in Vietnam), I realised my father hired a private teacher for my siblings and me because he didn’t want us to be discriminated against by the other school kids because of our Chinese ethnicity.
Migration Museum, Installation Shot
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.
In Toronto, Canada, we integrated into a Chinese-Vietnamese community. I assimilated well into Canadian life as a child, but for my parents, they resorted to factory work for the rest of their working lives because of the language barrier. To date, they still struggle with the weather.
Gradually I lost my Vietnamese vocabulary, then eventually my written Cantonese skills. When I visited Hong Kong in 2017, the city felt comfortable as I was able to communicate with the locals, but it felt different. I thought I would connect with my roots in mainland China, but in fact the opposite happened. Communicating in Cantonese was irrelevant, English was a struggle with the locals, and my Mandarin skills are non-existent. The experience felt like a scene from ‘Lost in Translation’.
Family Portraits, Acrylic and transfer on rusted steel plate, 18 x 24 cm. 2021
In Family Portraits, a foreground image of my family is overlaid on top of an aerial view of a refugee camp. The facial features are deliberately blurred to present a universal experience of migrants.
When I visited Vietnam in 2010 for the first time since leaving, I remember filling in the tourist visa form - Place of birth: Ho Chi Minh City, Nationality: Canadian. Although I can only understand some broken Vietnamese conversation, the country felt and tasted like home.
But wait, can I call myself Vietnamese even though I can’t communicate in their language?
Recently when I did more in-depth research about the boat people after the Vietnam War, I realised there was a second exodus of refugees in the late 1970s, this time mainly ethnically Chinese people from North Vietnam who fled to Hong Kong. Only then did I feel comfortable calling myself Vietnamese-Chinese-Canadian-British. My family’s migration history is a part of the complex fabric of the Vietnamese diaspora.
Structural Integrity, Acrylic, charcoal and transfer on concrete grout over found polystyrene
18 x 18 x 30 cm. 2021
In the sculpture Structural Integrity, a small-scale building block is precariously balanced to portray the experience of new immigrants living in a foreign country. After the Vietnam War, two million people left the country between 1975 and the 1990s; around 20,000 Vietnamese refugees were resettled in Britain, predominantly in the London boroughs of Hackney, Deptford, and Lewisham.
KV is a self-taught artist with a Masters in Structural Engineering. In his work he explores themes of migration and cultural assimilation, through a re-examination of his parents’ and his own experiences.
KV 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). The Migration Museum is KV’s first UK institutional exhibition.