Ashley Mai Nguyen’s drawings feel like memories that have decided to stay awake. They are tender and a little strange, full of small details that linger in the mind: the bend of a wrist, the edge of a dress, a haircut that says more than any expression could. For her exhibition at Nepenthes Woman Los Angeles, Nguyen brings that quietly insistent world into the store, where intimate scenes and imagined characters sit just a few feet from the clothes on the racks.
Nguyen grew up in the Long Beach area in a very full house. She is one of six siblings, part of a large Vietnamese family whose roots stretch back to farmland in Vietnam and forward to Southern California. Her parents, both born in Vietnam, moved to California, where they emphasized education and a practical path for their children. The house leaned toward STEM rather than art. Drawing, for Ashley, was a private current that ran against the grain of what was expected.
She did not grow up in museums. Instead, her visual vocabulary came from television and whatever happened to be on the family computer or living room screen. PBS cartoons, Sanrio characters, retro animated shows like He-Man and She-Ra, and later Beatles album covers all seeped into her imagination. She remembers listening to “Strawberry Fields Forever” in high school and drawing in the margins of her notebook, studying how those saturated, slightly psychedelic covers could hold so much feeling in such simple shapes.
That impulse carried her across the country. Nguyen studied Illustration at the Rhode Island School of Design with a concentration in drawing. There, the quiet habit of sketching turned into a rigorous daily practice. At RISD, she took part in the school’s infamous drawing marathon, a two-week intensive in which students draw for 12 hours a day, 5 days a week, using only charcoal. The goal is to strip everything back, break old habits, and rebuild from observation.
During that period, her life outside the studio intruded sharply. Nguyen’s grandmother, who had emigrated from Vietnam and remained a central figure in the family, passed away. Nguyen flew back to California for the funeral in the middle of the marathon, moving between a pressure cooker of formal training and the emotional weight of home. When she returned to Providence, she began a series of portraits that tried to hold her grandmother in place. Those drawings, made with all the new discipline RISD demanded and all the grief she was living through, became an early example of the balance her work continues to strike: familiar figures rendered with a sense of quiet strangeness, ordinary lives slightly heightened.
For Nguyen, drawing is less about grand gestures and more about immediacy. Painting feels ceremonial to her, something that requires space, preparation, and a mental readiness that can be intimidating. Drawing is different. A pen, a sketchbook, and a place to sit are enough. That low barrier to entry is essential. It allows her to move quickly, to work in the moment, and to make mistakes without treating them as disasters.
She does not draw everything she sees. Instead, she waits for a specific kind of spark. It might be the texture of a sweater, the way bangs fall across someone’s eyes, or a small piece of jewelry that quietly anchors a whole character. These are the details that make a stranger feel like a person with a life off the page. Nguyen will often build a portrait around that single point of interest, letting the rest of the figure grow outward from one strong visual attraction.
A recurring thread in her work is material. Fabric, hair, skin, plants and animals all appear, but rarely as straightforward studies. They act as carriers for personality. Nguyen talks about her drawings in terms of character design. Even when she works from observation, she is imagining backstories, thinking about why someone got dressed that way on that particular morning, or what kind of day they are having. Maternal relationships, siblings, and extended family appear as recurring presences, sometimes directly, sometimes abstracted into invented figures who nonetheless carry the same emotional weight.
The emotional tone of these characters is often subtle. Nguyen is drawn to artists like Yoshitomo Nara, whose children have minimal faces and simple, almost cartoonish bodies, but seem to hold complicated feelings. Nguyen is interested in that same middle space, somewhere between happiness and sadness, between innocence and worldliness. Rather than theatrical expressions, her figures tend to hold an interior mood that the viewer can sense but not name.
The sketchbook sits at the center of this practice. It is both archive and laboratory. Page after page is filled with observational drawings, quick notes, and experiments with pens, markers and pencils. She has an almost collector’s relationship to stationery. A particular pen color is enough reason to buy multiples; a new dual-tip marker can set off a whole series of drawings. In the sketchbook, she tests how different tools handle pattern, texture and line, and how fast or slow she wants a drawing to feel. Some pages are finished carefully over time, others are tossed off in a few minutes, more like a reflex than a decision.
The sketchbook sits at the center of this practice. It is both archive and laboratory. Page after page is filled with observational drawings, quick notes, and experiments with pens, markers and pencils. She has an almost collector’s relationship to stationery. A particular pen color is enough reason to buy multiples; a new dual-tip marker can set off a whole series of drawings. In the sketchbook, she tests how different tools handle pattern, texture and line, and how fast or slow she wants a drawing to feel. Some pages are finished carefully over time, others are tossed off in a few minutes, more like a reflex than a decision.
Color is chosen by feel. Some drawings are almost monochrome, focused on value and structure. Others are saturated and playful, leaning into the “kawaii” aesthetic of Sanrio toys and childhood stationery. Nguyen links her color choices to personality. Quiet subjects might be rendered in muted hues, while louder or more textured characters invite bolder, more layered palettes. That instinctive approach lets each drawing find its own temperature rather than conforming to a fixed scheme.
When a drawing leaves the sketchbook and becomes a finished work, the surface changes. Nguyen is particular about paper. She often sources it from Hiromi Paper in Culver City, a shop that specializes in Japanese papermaking traditions. Mulberry fiber papers and different varieties of washi appear frequently in her studio. They are thin yet surprisingly strong, and they absorb ballpoint ink in a way that feels both crisp and soft. These papers carry their own quiet history, shaped by craftspeople who have repeated the same gestures for years. That sense of accumulated touch sits underneath Nguyen’s lines and gives the drawings a kind of latent texture even where the page appears empty.
Los Angeles, the city she grew up near and has now returned to after four years on the East Coast, hovers at the edge of the work. It appears indirectly, in the light, in the way people dress, in the atmosphere of bus rides and cafes and family gatherings. Nguyen is still getting reacquainted with it as an adult, but the city’s mix of sprawl and intimacy already suits her way of looking. She pays attention to the small things that might otherwise be lost in the noise.
At Nepenthes Woman Los Angeles, her drawings occupy a space that is both domestic and public. Visitors can move from clothes to artwork and back again, noticing a collar here or a pattern there, then seeing similar details reappear in the figures on the wall. It feels fitting for Nguyen’s work to live in such a context. Her practice is rooted in everyday life, in the textures of fabric and family and small decisions that accumulate into a day. The exhibition offers a glimpse into that ongoing sketchbook, a place where the outside world and the inner one overlap, and where a single pair of bangs or a bracelet can become the starting point for an entire universe.