“Might I See You Again”
The Corey Helford Gallery in Los Angeles has recently opened an exhibition that confronts big emotions. Hieu Thien Nguyen, known artistically as kelogsloops, debuts Love, Death & All Her Friends, a stunning show of ethereal works created in the artist’s signature style. Using watercolor, gouache, pencil, and gold leaf, the narrative compositions explore how nothing stays the same. Love, loss, and ultimately accepting them are part of life.
When something great happens, it’s easy to feel on top of the world. But when you’re experiencing challenging emotions like grief, you can slip into questioning, “Why me?” In Love, Death & All Her Friends, Nguyen takes us through the beginnings of love, the pain that comes with inevitable endings, and the view that accepting them is what makes life meaningful.
“There is no bitterness here,” Nguyen says, “but instead an honest look at what it means to love something, knowing it won’t last forever, but to find beauty in that anyway.”
For Nguyen, that beauty comes in the form of dreamlike works in which a central figure experiences it all in a wordless story. We see her fall in love, mourn its loss, and ultimately sit with it all in a singular painting titled Love, Death & All Her Friends. She is at peace. Each of Nguyen’s works taps into universal experiences, and we’re able to recognize and place ourselves into the point of view of the characters. It encapsulates what Nguyen does so brilliantly with his art; his pieces have an otherworldly feel while appealing to human emotion.
My Modern Met spoke with Nguyen about how Sailor Moon helped jump-start his love of art and what creating this body of work taught him. Scroll down to read our exclusive interview. If you’re in the Los Angeles area, you can visit the show in person at the Corey Helford Gallery through October 24, 2026.
“Laundry and Taxes”
How did you first become interested in art?
The earliest recollections of what got me into art were two things: I grew up with older brothers who subjected me to watching a lot of anime and video games; my brother’s girlfriend (now sister-in-law) showed me how to draw Sailor Moon (a character from an anime of the same name) using one of those “How-to-Draw-Faces in 5-Steps” type of things. Exhilarated by the fact that I could literally recreate and bring to life to this awesome character with my own hands, I was hooked and never put down the pencil ever since.
How did you foster your talent?
Growing up, I was always the “art kid.” The one who was never paying attention to the teacher and drawing all over his books in class. I’m not sure if you’d necessarily call that “fostering the talent,” but I’d always let my mind wander and come up with new stories I wanted to tell, characters I wanted to draw. Sure I’d get in trouble for drawing all over my homework, but I guess feeding into that meant that my creativity was allowed to grow and be nurtured.
Though I don’t think it was until late high school/university that I really let my creativity flourish and bloom that led to what it is today!
“With the Sandman”
You have a beautiful way of using watercolor. How did you develop your approach to watercolor, and how does it best help bring your work to life?
Thank you! Truthfully I never set out to make watercolor my primary medium, nor did I ever think I would be any good at it. I’d picked it up during a high school art class for an assignment that our teacher forced on us. The stigma around watercolor is unfortunately that it’s a hobbyist medium, usually for kids to play with. But there was this one particular artist, Silvia Pelissero (Agnes-Cecile), who worked with watercolor and she painted with such raw expression and otherworldly beauty that magnetized me to the medium. I tried painting like her and despised the medium almost immediately! It was chaotic, difficult to control and just too unpredictable.
Up until that point I mostly made art digitally, painting with a digital tablet. I think I almost took it as a challenge for myself to try to improve my watercolor and harness it to a level where it could resemble my digital work, which was often very smoothed out and controlled. So I’d developed techniques and an approach to watercolor that resembled a digital painting workflow, which resulted in the kind of work that I make today.
With watercolor, typically you’d paint in a few layers, working light-to-dark and working fairly light. But because of my digital art background, I painted in mannnnyyyy layers, building up the colors and depth to a level that it resembled digital art. I often have to try to remind myself not to treat the medium this way though, and to let watercolor be watercolor. To embrace the textures, the spontaneity and the unpredictability that makes watercolor so unique and beautiful!
“Flowerspotting”
You’ve said that the most powerful stories often begin with a single moment, whether that’s a color, musical clip, or an image. How do you use this as a jumping-off point for your work?
The inspirations for each of my works all differ, but the commonality between them all is that they are most often sparked by a small, singular thing. Sometimes it’s as simple as a lyric of a song, the way the colors of a sunset fall onto a cloud, or even a line of dialogue from a movie or a poem. Somehow with these singular little moments, it’s like my mind suddenly latches on and unravels a story within my head. Like a little spark to a fire I guess! But once that fire begins, my mind won’t stop until I flesh out the concept in my sketchbook, which then spans into a story, a painting, or even a series!
For example, in this recent body of work, one painting was inspired by the song title of Billie Eilish’s song, “Halley’s Comet.” Curious about what it was, I’d looked into it and discovered that it was a comet that circles around once every 75 or so years: in other words, once in a lifetime. There was something so poetic about that concept, and so it sparked this idea of wanting to paint the feeling of witnessing something “life changing.”
Another example? In the film Everything Everywhere All at Once, there’s a line of dialogue between the two lovers that goes, “In another life, I would have really liked to have done laundry and taxes with you.” It was a proclamation about one’s earnest love for the other that spans across the infinite timelines and realities, and there was something so beautiful in that, which inspired me to make a painting about what it’s like to happily do the most mundane things in life, as long as you’re with the people you love. Each piece always has these singular jumping-off points, that eventually with enough development turn into these completed paintings with little stories inside.
“The Waiting Room”
“The Carousel”
The works in this show contend with some big emotions, including love and grief. How has making art around these ideas affected your life outside of art (or vice versa)?
Making art is a vessel for expression to me. Often I’m not the best with words, and so I draw.
In telling this story and all of these ideas, it unearthed a lot I hadn’t realized I had bubbling in the back of my mind, but also touched the way I view the world at the same time. I’d had this concept in my mind years ago, starting with this sketch about said “Love, Death & All Her Friends” I’d done in around 2021. I always knew I wanted to one day paint this concept, but over the years it simmered in the back of my mind and slowly began to span a story bigger than I wanted to tell. Between then and now, a lot has happened. I’ve lost friends, family, experienced love, heartbreak, regret, joy, sadness, and everything else in between that’s just part of life.
Somehow, the concept grew from wanting to depict a scene of these characters experiencing a singular moment of quiet with each other, into a way of me formulating a lot of these feelings and ideas through the vessel of a narrative. A story about these characters and their journey to meeting each other.
With tapping into such emotions and ideas, there obviously comes a price. I had to dig a little deeper and unearth many things, which would at times leave me a little vulnerable and raw, reliving the feelings and whatnot. But being able to revisit them after so much time had passed, kind of let me look at it all as if I was a visitor. With a bit of newfound perspective or experience if you will. And so it presented me an opportunity to almost say goodbye or come to terms with all these things that has happened, thanks to all the lessons and experiences that I’ve had along the way.
It’s a very sensitive, but honest collection of work and ideas with big emotions as you described, but ultimately they’re all simple feelings that I think most people can understand or have experienced.
“Love, Death & All Her Friends”
What piece (or pieces) do you feel epitomize the essence of Love, Death & All Her Friends?
The title painting, Love, Death & All Her Friends, was meant to encapsulate the theme and story wholly. The collection of work is a discussion about the passage of time, and a celebration of the beauty of the impermanence of everything. It’s a tough pill to swallow that not everything can last forever, but there can be a sort of comfort in acknowledging that everything runs its course, and that we all share that commonality.
The painting is meant to be exactly about that: it depicts the titular characters finally coming to terms with the finiteness of everything, and instead of living in fear and fighting it, they find comfort in each other knowing that they’re in it together. So Love, the representation of life, sits idly with Death, the representation of Time, and is joined by her Friends, the lessons that we experience through hardships, as they watch the world go by. It isn't supposed to be dark or bitter, nor happy or romantic, but instead a sort of peace.
“Against the World”
“The Carousel”
You have a wide array of artistic influences, from Miyazaki films to Monet and Klimt. In what ways do you see them playing a role in your work?
Stylistically, it’s very obvious that my work is heavily inspired by anime! Growing up I’d always loved watching Studio Ghibli films, but in recent years I’ve been stepping away from portraits to more full-bodied works that focus on narrative, and sometimes “larger-than-life” ideas. I feel like watching Miyazaki films as an adult has this same effect, where when I was a kid I thought they were just fun and cute movies, but now I realize that his films capture a feeling that’s hard to describe with words. In the same way his films make me feel that, I’ve been inspired to try and do the same with my works for this show. Coincidentally enough, there’s a painting from this collection that’s inspired by a specific scene from a Ghibli film, which was painted with the intention to do just that: capture a simple feeling, rather than explain a difficult concept. I’m curious to see if people can pick up on which one it is!
With regards to Monet and Klimt, their role in my work is just the same! While I was younger I adored their work because of the surface-level beauty of it all and technicality, but as I’ve gotten a little older I find that when I see their work I feel more than I see, and so I’m always trying to chase being able to achieve just that. In the way that you might see a Monet and think, “Wow, beautiful colors and cool technique,” you could also delve into his work and realize, “Wow, I can really feel the warmth of the sun peeking out of the cold wintry morning.” It’s a feeling so specific that you can almost feel it in your skin, and it’s what he did best: bottling up a feeling and putting it onto canvas for us to feel, just as much as it was for us to see.
“With the Sandman”
You have a massive social media presence. What is it like being an artist with such an enthusiastic following?
It’s very surreal. I try to remind myself as often as I can that I have this incredible privilege to have such an enthusiastic following. Younger me would never have believed that I’d be where I am today, with an audience around me that supports my work so wholeheartedly. I am perpetually grateful to the people that have supported my work to this day and are the reason that I get to do what I do.
The best part about it is the very rare occasions where I get to actually meet people in person. Everything I do is online, so my interactions with my audience are always behind a screen. But in those rare moments where I might bump into someone, it feels very jarring, and I realize, “Oh, you’re actually a real person?!”
“Koi No Yokan”
What do you hope viewers take away from the show?
I would love for people to walk away from this show and think, “Damn, life really is beautiful, huh.” While the show touches on some more melancholic topics, it ultimately is a celebration of life and the appreciation of the finiteness of everything.
At the same time, I hope the works resonate with people so strongly that they might even be able to find some release or solace with the various topics the works discuss. Sometimes words aren’t enough to express something, but sometimes art can be more than enough.
“Strangers Again”
“Halley’s Comment ”
