The first time I met the artist KV Duong was at the opening of his first solo exhibition at Pippy Houldsworth Gallery in January 2026. I went there mostly out of curiosity—an emerging London-based Vietnamese artist getting to show with a reputable London gallery is a major event in the ESEA art community.
My hunch was right. The gallery was crowded with friendly faces who looked like me, mingling with those from diverse backgrounds—my sensitivity towards people’s ethnicities has sharpened after I relocated to London from Hong Kong, where nearly 92 percent of the population is Han Chinese. If I had to name a moment of reckoning my affection for London, that was it—a culturally diverse crowd who came together to celebrate the work of an artist.
My little moment of indulgence was briefly interrupted when I was introduced to the star of the show. At first, I thought I had to come up with lines from the usual art-opening conversation. But instead of asking the artist a question—my usual job as an art journalist and writer—I was asked one that caught me by surprise.
“Do you speak Cantonese?” KV Duong asked.
Instinctively, I gave him an affirmative answer, despite my confusion at the time. Why would he ask me that question? Wasn’t the artist Vietnamese?
I scanned the gallery space and noticed something strangely familiar. Located near the entrance was a small installation resembling an altar commonly found in our homes where we pay respect to our ancestors. There was no ancestral tablet, but there were three sticks of incense planted in a bowl with Chinese patterns similar to the one I grew up with. Further down the corridor, pictures of elders were hung in a fashion similar to those of my ancestors in my family’s home in Hong Kong. Had I come to the right place? Was this an exhibition by a Vietnamese artist or someone else?
Of course, I later learnt that the London-based, Canada-raised structural engineer-turned-artist is ethnically Chinese, born in Ho Chi Minh City to a family with a long Cantonese heritage. His paintings of the landscape of his home country, scarred by the Vietnam War, and his depiction of images representing his family are emotionally powerful and relatable. The use of latex rather than canvas as a symbol of the complexities of Vietnamese history and LGBTQ+ identity offers layered reading and reflection on the past, present and future. His art is not made for a minority, but for a wide audience who can relate to and sympathise with these stories.
But it was KV’s question about my Cantonese that sent me into deep reflection.
Cantonese Beyond Hong Kong
Am I just a Cantonese speaker or more?
I was seldom asked what languages I speak; I just took them for granted. No one would ask me that in Hong Kong or London. I might occasionally be asked by people from Hong Kong who recently relocated to the UK—nearly 200,000 Hong Kongers have moved to the UK since the launch of the BN(O) visa scheme in 2021 for those born before Britain’s handover of the city’s sovereignty to China in 1997 and their descendants—and it is likely that they’d prefer conversing in their mother tongue as a gesture to hold on to their identity while building a new life away from home.
For as long as I can remember, Hong Kongers have embraced Cantonese as the de facto official language after waves of migration over the past century, as Cantonese replaced languages spoken prior to the mid-19th century, such as Weitou (圍頭話), Hakka (客家話) and Tanka (蜑家話). They take pride in Cantonese cuisine and pop culture in their language, from Canto-pop to Hong Kong cinema and television, which were exported across and dominated East and Southeast Asia once upon a time. Over the past decade and a half, however, Hong Kong has become increasingly inward-looking. The city has been so consumed and overwhelmed by its own struggles that it has forgotten how outgoing and open to other cultures it used to be.
KV’s question yanked me out of this. Cantonese is a language spoken not just in Hong Kong, but also in Guangdong in southern China, Macau, parts of Southeast Asia and many Chinatowns across the world. His trajectory also reminds me of the long lineage of Cantonese—his ancestors were born in Vietnam over a century ago, and to this day, KV still manages to speak with his family in basic Cantonese. As a language, Cantonese is more resilient than I thought. Generations of migration and dispersal have yet to kill it. Rather than being a language that sits neatly within certain geographical boundaries, it transcends time and space, acting as a thread connecting communities across the world as well as our elders and ancestors. Cantonese is more than just a language. It is the emblem of resilience, a cultural DNA embodied in our upbringing that shapes who we are today.
The British Had a Role to Play
KV told me that he left Vietnam for Canada at the age of seven in 1987. It was in the midst of a humanitarian crisis resulting from decades of brutal conflict, from the Vietnam War (1954–1975) to the Cambodian-Vietnamese War (1978–1989). According to a 2016 report authored by Alexander Casella, who served as the director of the East Asia Bureau for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the refugee crisis of Vietnamese “boat people” lasted for 21 years. People such as KV and Oscar-winning actor Ke Huy Quan were among those who left the country as children.
Although KV did not set foot in Hong Kong during his journey, his story brought back many of my childhood memories. Growing up, the Vietnamese boat people crisis was constantly in the news, as Hong Kong was declared a port of first asylum by the British colonial government in 1979. Quan was among the tens of thousands who arrived in Hong Kong before resettling elsewhere. These devastating stories were also told in films, such as New Wave director Ann Hui’s classic “Vietnam Trilogy”—Below the Lion Rock: The Boy from Vietnam (1978), The Story of Woo Viet (1981) and Boat People (1982).
