KV Duong: Where Wound Becomes Water | Pippy Houldsworth Gallery
Where Wound Becomes Water, the titular work for this exhibition, is a five-panel painting of a bomb pond in rural Vietnam. These ponds are man-made: craters from bombs dropped in the Vietnam War of the 1960s and 70s.
Duong, who has a Vietnamese background but lives and works in the UK, didn’t paint from life. He was inspired by a series of photos of the ponds from Cambodian photographer Vandy Rattana. And besides, the composition is deliberately unreal: it’s etched on latex, the shiny surface lending the painting an odd inner glow.
Second, his colour palette is hellish: the landscape is a deep red, the pond a lurid yellow. An evil green band represents the mountains in the background. Third, each of Duong’s panels is framed and crossed by red bands: like a window panel or a cross-hair.
Taken together, the scene is desolate, albeit the shiny throb of the latex lends a certain animating energy to the scene. It signals the dreadful pull of home for the diasporic artist; it demands solemn contemplation for any viewer who sees these ponds, these bonds, at a greater remove.
KV Duong: Where Wound Becomes Water is at Pippy Houldsworth Gallery (London). 30 January - 14 March 2026