Denise Duong was born in Oklahoma City to Vietnamese refugee parents. Drawing was where she began — bears, first, obsessively, and then the spindly-limbed figures and recurring unnamed characters that populate her paintings now. She studied sculpture and printmaking at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she developed the narrative register of her work while drawing in transit — on trains, at bus stops — building long, detailed records of what it felt like to be a young person dropped into the productive chaos of a large city. After Chicago she moved to Hawaii, where the natural world entered her palette and began to change how she traveled. She returned permanently to Oklahoma City in 2013, which became the base for sustained worldwide travel that feeds directly into the work.
In Remind Me How To Live, A figure with a pale, painted face and wide staring eye turns sharply leftward within a vertical composition bisected by bare golden-brown tree trunks that frame rather than recede into space. The body is dressed in a purple jacket with visible brushwork texture layered over deep navy pants, while white and cream paint-drips cascade down the lower half like snow or tears, contrasting with the warm yellow disk hovering behind the head. Skeletal vines rendered in burnt sienna branch across the right side and background, creating a decorative arabesque that competes with the figure's intensity rather than supporting it. The work's central weakness lies in this decorative excess—the botanical elements and sparkly surface details diffuse what might otherwise be a more psychologically direct portrait of apprehension or vigilance. In Take Me Away, Against a densely brushed storm of charcoal, slate, and prussian blue—its surface worked with visible directional strokes that flatten the space—red and teal balloons of textured paper or fabric sit scattered like buoys, while two figures rendered in pale acrylic float tethered by brown cord amid a bicycle wheel, a paintbrush, and architectural sketches. The composition hangs figures vertically in the upper half, with the woman in white dominating the center while balloons anchor the lower register and edges, creating a roughly circular arrangement that reads as both weightless and constrained. The juxtaposition of meticulously drawn domestic objects (house outline, rope knots) with the gestural storm threatens to swallow them, suggesting that escape fantasies collide with the material weight of daily life.
My work is a deep dive into the emotional and spiritual aspects of being a human — the explorations of the curious and the love of all the tiny moments. There is always a story hidden behind the eyes and the way it’s interpreted.
