By Yue Chen.

Known for his iconic visual style, writer-director Andrew Thomas Huang crafts hybrid fantasy worlds and mythical dreamscapes. A Grammy-nominated music video director, Huang's collaborators include Björk, FKA Twigs and Thom Yorke among others. His films have been commissioned by and exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, NY, The Sydney Opera House and the Museum of Contemporary Art, LA. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Yue Chen: Could you describe your personal background?

Andrew Thomas Huang: My family's Toisanese: my grandparents immigrated after World War II. My mom was born in LA. My dad was born in Hong Kong, but immigrated when he was an infant to New York, and then eventually made his way to LA. I was born in Torrance and grew up in the South Bay of LA. We have some artists in the family; my aunt and uncle are graphic designers. My parents were just always really supportive of my art from a young age. I was a big, like, Muppets fan, so I would build puppets, and I [wanted] to be one of those people that made the animatronics—the radio controlled creature effects stuff. I would say I started playing with digital video when it became widely available in, like, 1999. I remember even having a graphics card that would convert analog to digital files. And I kept making things, and then I studied Art at USC. I just knew I was good at art and that I should use that as my entry into film, and I knew that I wanted to be near the film program, but not necessarily in it, so that I could absorb the best of both worlds. And I think I soon realized that I had all the tools already at my disposal to make whatever I wanted. So I made a short film on my own in my dorm, outside of the curriculum, and put it on YouTube––back when YouTube was only two years old––and it went viral. That really was the thing that started my career: graduating with that moment of opportunity, where the film had a lot of traction and it was the nudge to start directing.

YC:Your digital artwork often mixes textures and colors and structures. And if you think about your background in puppetmaking, puppetmaking is like this act of creating something physical to convey an intangible story. Whereas when it comes to something like films or digital art, including works that aren't based in reality, it sometimes seems like there's an attempt to recreate or reground what is fundamentally disembodied in relatable physicality.

ATH: I remember interning in college at Sony Imageworks, and they were one of the biggest corporate internship jobs I had. I want to be a holistic part of making something. I just found more that I thrived at smaller animation or effects production houses where you could do everything because you had to. You have more ownership, and you could do more indie level stuff, and therefore have more authorship over what you were trying to say. I get excited when I don't know how something was done, and I think there's a magic to hybrid techniques.

But, also, there's a hybridity in myself as second or third generation Asian American, because I am being a queer Asian American. Maybe at the time, it wasn't quite… that wasn't so conscious. A friend shared this great article basically talking about what I would term to be “queer morphologies,” or, like, the otherness of being queer sometimes feels best-represented by things that are other than human. And I always think about Star Wars, or like, fantasy movies that I grew up watching, like The Dark Crystal. I related more to the aliens. Like, that's just who I identified with. Maybe that idea of puppetry, as inhabiting a story by proxy, seems to be the best vehicle to tell what are inherently disembodied stories or more internal stories that live in metaphor. I've never been attracted to social realism in general in film. I just feel like I'm much more interested in internal stories. And I do think that there are just certain visual vocabularies that are better at describing that internal experience than others.

YC: Looking at your music videos broadly, it seems that you often employ distinctive fashion and styling choices. Do you come up with the styling vision you want, or are there people you collaborate with on costuming?

ATH: Depends on what it is. For Kiss of the Rabbit God (2019), the costume designer was Stephanie Strate, who’s really talented. And I just knew that I wanted this god to be both timeless and ancient, but also timely and very contemporary. So, you know, there's the god in the void dream world. And then there's the god in this world. I wanted that god to be almost like a K-pop star. You have shows like American Gods that are like… I mean, I like the idea of transposing an ancient mythological character into this world. But I want to show them in a garment that connects them to the actual myth. I knew for a fact that I wanted the emblem, the double happiness symbol on his pelvis. But then, I gave that task to an artist named Tanya Melendez, who does this beautiful, intricate braid work, and she also did the makeup and the hair in the film. Like, Stephanie came up with costume ideas that I couldn't think of, but they were based on a direction that I gave. It's a mix of research and personal design and then entrusting the work to better artists than I am to execute it.

In some of my Björk videos, Björk has her own host of stylists that she likes to work with. In the case of [‘The Gate’ (2017)], that dress was custom designed by Gucci, and that was actually how we funded the project. We also did a project where she had a custom outfit made by Iris van Herpen, the Dutch designer, and Iris made her costumes also off sketches that I had made for the film. So it's all a conversation. I think that you can tell a whole story with just the costume in a movie.

YC: In FKA Twigs’ “Cellophane” (2019), I see the arcs of the music video as ascension, freefall, and consumption. Does that track for you?

ATH: Yeah, you could say a strive for perfection, a fall from grace, and then a healing or a being put back together. She enters this mortal plane where there's this invisible audience and she's dressed to kill, and she's there to give this performance. And as she gives that performance, she's striving towards this unattainable angelic version of herself. Only when she confronts herself does she collide with that self image and collapse—the climax of the video is her descent. It is her failure to embody that. And then the film ends with, you know, her naked, covered in mud being put together by these elderly women. It's a humbling story. And I think all of us who have failed or fallen in some time in our life, understand that feeling of being human and being put in our place. I think that's maybe why the video did well—the story I think, was very relatable for a lot of people.

YC: “Cellophane” begins with a performance—like a “pride goeth before the fall” story. But in a way, music videos themselves are also performances. Commercially speaking, you have to make something that is both visually compelling and tells a specific, relatable story. Do you think that there's ever a trade off between visual aesthetics and thematic substance, or if they're inextricable from one another?

ATH: I do think that they're different. In fact, when I did the video for Björk, ‘Black Lake’ (2015)... That was a challenging experience because I am just such a visual person, and so my goal is to tell that story visually, in a way that I know how, but I think Björk wanted to do that whole ten minute film in, like, two takes. What she taught me is: that performance she's giving is, like, she's giving something really real. It's like a ritual, and you can't just repeat it over and over. We did many different edits of that, because there were shots that I just thought were so gorgeous, and, to me, captured how haunting the song was. But she'll see a moment when she was doing something and she knows for a fact that it was a connected performance moment—and yet my camera is out of focus, or it's pointing the wrong direction. So it was a compromise, sometimes, to pick the shots that were real [for] her performance, and then also capturing the visual story of it all.

Sometimes it works perfectly; sometimes you get both the visuals and the performance working together. But I just think that they are two different disciplines. It's easy, sometimes, as a director, to pay too much attention to one or the other. I think that there are some directors who are really visual, and some who are really performance-based. And I am a visual person by trade. But I definitely think my collaborations with Björk and Twigs were an education to change my priorities of what I'm paying attention to while we're rolling and while we're editing.

YC: When I was watching “The Gate,” in particular, I was entranced. I'm curious about what your specific artistic vision behind this music video was and how the song influenced you, how Björk herself influenced your creative process.

ATH: Prior to “The Gate” we'd been on this long journey together, where we made so many videos from Vulnicura, and we did this whole VR experiment together with Björk Digital. It felt like “The Gate” was the perfect culmination of all that work and a good send-off into the next album, Utopia. A lot of the concept came from a combination of conversations.

One, just hearing the song for the first time and thinking how haunting it was—she was really much more into flutes and airy instruments at that time. She said that the song is about two lovers sending a prism of light between each other. And I just thought, How good would this be if it was just a one-shot video where there were no cuts? Even within an intimate space, you can create a really dynamic journey in the space between two people. In a way, that video is very sweeping and almost sufic, and trancelike. I wanted it to be a hypnotic, meditative, transcendent experience, and a few other things, too.

If you look at a lot of Björk’s previous work, there wasn't a straight line in almost any of her visuals—it was all very bio-organic. And we were talking about the Futurists as a movement, and how that movement arose out of the trauma of industrialization, really, and out of the advent of a really violent new century. People were trying to capture what it felt like to live in the industrial age, but also were trying to imagine a new future for themselves. It's a constructivist movement, and it's got, like, straight lines and repeated patterns. And so, “The Gate” just has these repeating lines and repeating shapes and geometric—beautifully mathematical… but ultimately, she has these seraphim-like wings on her dress.

And we're talking about light prisms, how light is these rays that are just fracturing, and it’s a spectrum that just fans out, so the whole thing is about this spectrum of light, or her body. Actually, she said this, like, verbatim—she was saying that her divorce was a psychic rupture where she felt like she was fractured into different pieces. And in a way that's what happens in the video: she's broken apart and put back together in this prism that she passes back and forth.

And then we also talked about chakras and Vedic spiritualism—it's easy for this stuff to get really woowoo, you know? But I only say that because these ideas are actually sacred ideas that have been commodified for Westerners as forms of fast food spiritualism. People can just hop over to like a crystal shop in Brooklyn and get a piece of citrine to make themselves feel better, or whatever. And it's very self serving, but the truth is Vedic ideas, Kundalini transcendence and stuff—these are meant to be roadmaps and guidelines for not just personal care, but also societal care. They're meant to be roadmaps for salvation for an entire community. I think that's what is important to this idea of utopia: we can't fix society until we fix ourselves. And I wanted “The Gate” to encapsulate all of these ideas that we were talking about—to feel like the building of a new universe simply through the interaction of two people in love.

YC: I'm curious about the body and its associated possibilities, and I want to talk about Interstice (2016). When I was watching its behind-the-scenes video, you said that it was inspired by lion dances. How did you choose to represent concepts like single body versus multiple bodies through choreography?

ATH: That project was kind of a beginning for me, in terms of trying to unpack ideas that I've carried my whole life that I never quite was able to talk about, and I wanted to make something without having to explain myself very much. I was interested in religious traditions. The Western Christian productions of, like, spectacle in the church—I was inspired by those giant sensors that they swing in the Catholic Church, you know, the way they swing incense? There's a spectacle to that. And I was like, how is that any different than the spectacle of firecrackers and [lion dances] warding off evil? There was something cross-cultural there that I wanted to … invent my own version of that. My last film before that, and all my projects, had involved so much of visual effects, trickery, that I wanted to work with dance and performers who could do that magic on camera with their own bodies.

YC: In an interview that you did with The Love Magazine, you said your films are confessional in nature, and that Kiss of the Rabbit God is no different. Confession intrinsically implies this power dynamic, both within the confession being given and between the confessions and the confessor. What are you trying to deliver yourself from, and how does the voyeuristic quality of film facilitate or burden that process of deliverance?

ATH: You're right, there is an implied power dynamic, I guess. I am definitely a filmmaker of the Internet generation. Film is weird, because you put this thing out there, and you're not performing it real time. But still, every time you make a work, I think it costs you something emotional. Or I should say: if you give it something emotional, it will cost you something, and putting it out there is also costly. Because there's risk involved—there's risk of being judged. So it takes a lot of resilience, I think, to share it, but then you're also gifted any time people say that it resonated with them. The confession is like that exchange—it's almost metabolic. It costs you something, but you gain something back. And people mirror back to you. Which I think is the magic of giving. I guess maybe I'm delivered from my isolation of feeling like I'm the only person that experiences this.

I, historically, had not been brave enough to make a song with a gay Asian storyline—or an Asian storyline at all—because I didn't yet take the time to think about what would appeal to me or what would be interesting to me. But when I set out to make Rabbit God, I was like, Okay, I'm going to make a film that is only about this queer, Asian romance. And everyone's like, Oh, Happy Together—and no, it's not Happy Together. It’s got something supernatural. To tell a story like that, on my terms, is empowering, and I guess it delivers me from that feeling of invisibility and disembodiment that I had felt previously. And it doesn't mean that that goes away—it is therapy, I guess, a form of claiming or reclaiming of who I am or the space that I inhabit. One of the best screenings I have for the film was here in LA at a gallery called Navel, and all these queer Asian people came out. We screened the film, and everyone was so supportive, and it was electric, because I felt suddenly I was with my people and I felt like I could actually talk to a room and everyone would know what I'm talking about. And so that did deliver me; it allowed me communion with people.

YC: Kiss of the Rabbit God is obviously grounded in mythology, but it's also a retelling. I'm wondering how you deal with the historical burden of using mythology in your work and how you transform mythology to suit a contemporary context. In other words, how do you ‘queer’ mythology or history?

ATH: Well, it's a mix, and I admit that I took a lot of liberties, obviously. I would try to find actual academic journals or publications that talked about this stuff, and it was just clear that there have been queer mythology, storylines, and narratives in Chinese culture, but that a lot of it's been erased or forgotten.

The rabbit god is a pretty modern invention—only from the 18th century. So, I think in a way, it also speaks to the living inventiveness of Chinese folklore and mythology and that these deities are still in Chinese blockbuster films and TV shows. It still endures despite how secular the government is. I think I was also schooled when I had the privilege of going to New Taipei City and screening the film at the actual temple. I'll say in short—it was a cultural disconnect. I think what I'm trying to poetically say may not exactly resonate with audiences over there. It was a learning experience to create a work based on a real religious community and practice and mythology. I think I learned a lesson perhaps to be more careful next time.

Yet, at the same time, I think as a Westerner, confronting uniquely Asian American issues, I also feel like we, as Asian Americans, have the right to be inventive and to trust our ingenuity as people who are hybrids in a hybrid culture. We have to find our voice, and I still think that we're finding it. In the Asian American community, there's so much appropriation of Black culture, and we don't talk about it so much. The only way to create a unique voice for ourselves is to look back and do the research and the homework and look at where we came from. But we also have to invent a new vocabulary for ourselves.

YC: In the movie, the god says that open wounds are gateways, and if you leave them for too long, they will fester. But he and Matt carry the evidence of their mutual embodiment imprinted in scars. I'm wondering how you map this physical healing of the wound to the journey of sexual understanding and intimate belonging.

ATH: The idea of the ‘erotic’ with a capital E—to experience that is like the experience of becoming or the experience of stepping into oneself and becoming embodied. What this character is struggling with is that he feels invisible, but the minute that this god sees him, it's the thing he's always wanted, which is to be seen. But when someone sees you—or sometimes when you get the thing you've always wanted—I think it can be really traumatic. Like, I remember the first time I ever was sexually intimate with someone, it's something I always wanted, but I wouldn't allow myself to experience that fully. I resisted the idea because I was so convinced that I was undesirable. And so here's a character grappling with that same issue, and the only way they can confront that is to transgress the boundary of their own flesh.

It’s also inspired by these Jungian ideas that spiritual individuation happens through this flaying process—flaying your skin and shedding and molting to become something new that is quite a painful process. So I thought, why not have Matt symbolically step into himself through this ritual process of flaying himself? I wanted it to be a beautiful bloodletting, I guess. And I was interested in healing scars. I think they're beautiful, and I think that it’s a literalized display of someone having overcome trials and becoming an adult, stepping into a role.

I created that mandala on the chest partly based on my research on seal scripts, but also, like, I love William Blake, and one of my favorite quotes is, “Eternity is in love with the productions of time.” I was thinking, if Tu Er Shen had an emblem, what would it look like? So I literalized that quote by putting eternity in the center, surrounded by the symbol for love. And I thought, maybe every symbol of love in that mandala is a different incarnation of Tu Er Shen in a different point of history. I actually think it would be cool to have a TV series where we have other queer diaspora tell a different incarnation of Tu Er Shen across the spectrum, you know? I admit that [Kiss of the Rabbit God] is a cis male, gay male story. Gods and mythology are reinterpreted every time we envision them. And I think that's what I love about Chinese mythology or Chinese religion as a living practice—that those gods are defined by our present. As queer people, if we're going to have a god, why can’t we invent this god on new terms, you know?

YC: One question that I had about both Kiss of the Rabbit God and Lily Chan and the Doom Girls (2020) is this idea of compulsion. In both movies, the protagonist is compelled by another force or person into gaining entry into another world. For Matt, it's a spiritual and sexual world, and for Lily, it’s a world of more freedom or agency. But the protagonists, rather than being their own agents of self-driven self-discovery, are led into making their choices. So does the addition of these enablers affect how you feel about Matt and Lily's respective awakenings?

ATH: I think in a lot of Western Hollywood or traditional Hollywood storytelling, there's the common advice that you should make your characters active. In a traditional hero's journey, the hero is someone who's driven by an objective and their actions get them into trouble, and that's what typically engages us. At the same time, it's a very Hollywood technique or Western narrative technique to have a catalyst, like Geoffrey Rush in The King's Speech or Angelina Jolie in Girl, Interrupted. You have these characters that are foils to bring out the change in the main character, and so I guess it's not always conscious, but I tend to write these stories where there's this main character being led into a space of agency. I think that when we're telling Asian American stories or immigrant stories, it may involve a certain degree of nuance and passivity that I think is culturally specific. This idea of volition, you know, varies culture to culture. And I think it's important for us to be specific. As I continue to learn to be a better writer, I also have to find ways to make my main characters more active, but maybe in quieter ways.

YC: Lily Chan and the Doom Girls is part of a larger feature film, Tiger Girl, which has backing from Sundance. How is that project going? You once mentioned that you wanted to shoot it in 2020; is that still happening?

ATH: Well, not anymore. Not during this pandemic. I think every filmmaker is inherently impatient, because it just moves so slow. Having been a music video director and a short form filmmaker, I’m used to things moving more quickly. But the pandemic has brought the industry to its knees. No one can even think past November, and this is the worst time to raise money for a movie. But at the same time. I've been really blessed and privileged to have the support of these institutions, something I've always wanted. I've always wanted to be part of the Sundance Labs. I'm just really grateful to Film Independent—if it wasn’t for Film Independent, I wouldn’t have made the proofs of concept.

I think the earliest we can shoot this would be summer of next year. But even then, we don't know how safe shooting is going to be. This film is period and involves magic and effects. It's expensive for a first movie, so I'm also just cognizant that I'm trying to raise a lot of money that may take longer and it's just more uphill. I feel that that time is finite, and I just want to make the movie, but this situation we’re in is humbling, and I am using it to work on other things as well.

YC: I’m glad you have other ongoing projects! Are you able to talk about what you're up to for the near term?

ATH: I'm doing an animated music video for Skrillex, and I have other scripts I've written—some are Asian American storylines, some are not. I have my second movie written, and I'm really passionate about making it. If there’s anything that might be close to Kiss of the Rabbit God, I would say that’s probably closer: it’s tonally really similar. I think that it has to be my second movie because it's even more expensive than Tiger Girl. And it’s also period, it’s also gay. In the end, I want to continue to make fantasy and worldbuilding stuff. But, you know, telling stories authentically just takes a long time.

YC: You've spoken about expanding the possibilities for Chinese American and Asian American art. I'm wondering how you think we should explore and claim more space and the artistic landscape without just rehashing white stories with Chinese faces.

ATH: It's complicated, right? Because you have some Asian Americans who are like, I'm tired of the heart-bleeding immigrant sob stories; I just want to see ourselves thriving and living our normal lives and you might have movies like Always Be My Maybe. That to me would be an example of just, like, contemporary comedic fun, like romantic comedy. And there's nothing wrong with that, you know, but like you said, it does walk a line where it's just, this could just be two white people. I think it begs the question of, like, what is the imperative of Asian creators to make work in dialogue with our heritage and who we are? Or just simply imagine ourselves in new spaces? I think this begs the question of all art, actually, because for some people, art has a responsibility to move the needle and improve and imagine a world forward. But at the same time, people also want art that reflects the present. They just want to see themselves mirrored. Like, is that too much to ask? So I think that you have art that's really galvanizing and critical and tries to challenge us, and then you have art that just simply is a mirror, and I think there's space for both. I'm more interested in art that is challenging, but I understand that at this point, even being mirrored is a political act. Until we have equitable representation for everybody, it will be a political act. Maybe to answer your question: I think there's space for all this kind of work.