On the beauty of imperfection

Artist and filmmaker Andrew Thomas Huang explores themes of queer futurism, Asian mythology, folklore, animism, ancestry and body memory. 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. He has also received film and sculpture commissions from the Thailand and Sydney Biennales. Most recently Huang launched his first solo exhibition at LACMA, The Deer of Nine Colors, a Buddhist sci-fi triptych film installation. A Grammy-nominated music video director, Huang’s collaborators include Björk, FKA Twigs, Eartheater, Perfume Genius, and Thom Yorke among others. As a creative director, Huang has led Björk’s pioneering traveling VR exhibition Björk Digital, as well as exhibitions for MUNCH Museum in Oslo, Norway. Huang continues to weave fine art, technology, and storytelling across various media, including opera, immersive XR experiences, and live performance. As a film director, Huang is in preparation for his first feature film TIGER GIRL which has received support from Cinereach, Film Independent, SFFILM and the Sundance Institute. Huang graduated with a degree in Fine Art and Animation from the University of Southern California.

We’ve been friends a while, but were first acquaintances in college, where the film school loomed large (though neither of us went there). I knew people then who made music videos to illustrate the extremity of their imaginations for no money. This was a way to become a big film director. Well into your career, you still make videos—and they are iconic. Did you always want to make music videos? Was it something that you fell into?

Well… to rewind a bit, when I was nine, The Jim Henson Company sent two puppeteers to our school, and they taught us how to cut patterns and build puppets out of foam and stuff. I got obsessed. I wanted to be a puppeteer—one of those Dark Crystal puppeteers hiding under animatronic latex. There’s no puppetry school. If you’re into puppets, people have backgrounds that are vast and varied. Mine was being a little freak at nine years old. I eventually got some mentorship.

Then, as a teenager, I moved toward digital animation and visual effects (to have a graphics card and to play video on your computer was novel in 1999). Someone in the industry said that I really needed to study drawing and painting. So I took classes at ArtCenter in Pasadena in high school, where I realized that if you can draw the human figure, you can articulate anything.

Then I went to art school at USC. I wanted to work in film, but wasn’t sure in what way. I did an internship at Sony Imageworks, I helped out on [USC] student films. I realized I had the tool set, and wanted to be the author of my own films. So I made a short film in my dorm and put it on YouTube back at the dawn of YouTube when they used to feature five videos a week. My film went viral. It was my first experience with virality—in 2006. The first two people to call me, literally the day after I graduated, were J.J. Abrams and Anonymous Content. And then Endeavor Agency at the time, now WME [Group].

Holy shit, I didn’t know that. That must have been a lot.

It was pretty overwhelming. I was an art student. I took a few film classes at USC, but I didn’t have the history or knowledge. I didn’t watch Lost. I was late to J.J. Abrams’ meeting and tracked mud into his office. It was so embarrassing… But they all nudged me to direct. I wanted to make movies. I tried writing, but couldn’t. So I leaned into what I was good at: visuals.

I ended up working at a small commercial production house, would save my money, and reinvest it in doing videos that didn’t pay at all because I was a music lover. I was unhappy working in advertising, but it did teach me how to be nimble.

I scrapped my reel, started over, and made a weird experimental short film that went viral again in 2012. After I released that experimental film, Björk, Thom Yorke, Joe Wright, and Sigur Rós all reached out to me. I felt suddenly seen and for doing something really weird at the dawn of the Vimeo era. I rode these waves of the internet, where visual culture was developing at a rapid speed. I got known as this art-and-tech-type of creator, especially doing things like Björk Digital, and working a lot in the digital space. But my heart was always in cinema.

It wasn’t until 2016 that I began reallocating my energy toward writing. I did the Sundance Labs and the Film Independent Labs. Simultaneously, the cinema landscape—especially in North America—has been eroding in its infrastructure. I’ve gotten this amazing education while our industry has been falling apart and reforming at a speed that’s faster than any of us can comprehend.

It feels so unfair because, to your point, you found and used resources, primed yourself for the next step, only for it to disappear. I know the stereotype of the millennial is that we’re in a state of arrested development, but, also, what else can we do?

Most creative people I know are just fighting really hard. Not just to financially get by, but also to mentally survive the demands of our attention and the algorithm and the amount of stimulation that we’re expected to cope with on a daily basis. Even just emails and texts. Maybe we have always been overstimulated through modernity, but now more than ever we’re under psychic assault. We’re experiencing a death of images with AI—there are more images than ever, yet they’ve been stripped of their potency and no one trusts them. This led directly to my recent work at LACMA. I made a film, a three-channel Buddhist sci-fi film I’m really proud of, called “The Deer of Nine Colors” for the Thailand Biennale.

There’s a lot about magic and myth alongside longing and deviance in your films. In Kiss of the Rabbit God [兔兒神], an object a man encounters in his daily life becomes a portal to the divine. The film at LACMA [“The Deer of Nine Colors”] is gorgeous—and pushes this impulse. In the months prior to its release, I loved hearing your experiences of trying building a mask, and then sending me a video of it coming together, it growing to include a live event. That was its own journey, leading to the performance you did with another dancer. Had you done dance before?

No, this was my first live performance.

That’s amazing, Andy. You always challenge yourself to learn—it’s really admirable.

It’s funny because no one really asked for this live show (I’m such an annoying overachiever). But I also wanted to close out the exhibition with something new, take us into a new conversation. While images are being stripped of their meaning and their ability to awaken us, a live show is a better medium for that. And this goes all the way back to my childhood history with puppetry. I never performed my puppetry—I felt like I had to just do it. There was a voice that said do it.

Would you just practice in your room?

I’m not going to lie, yeah [laughs]. As a kid I would do what Jim Henson did and practice with a live video feed. The thing about puppetry is it’s all about hiding and revealing yourself at the same time. And I think that being shy and queer and having this racial inferiority complex growing up not seeing other Asian people on screen–I think hiding while revealing yourself through this proxy was the logical solution.

For this [LACMA] performance, I was lucky to collaborate with Kyoko Takenaka, a multi-hyphenate artist with a background in Butoh. In the film, we used Thai classical dance as a springboard because we filmed in Thailand. I had the honor of working with two of the best Thai classical dancers in the country—it felt right to tell a Thai story and end it with a remix of this traditional art form. I couldn’t afford to bring those Thai collaborators over to the US. I thought, “Maybe I need to step into the costume.” I was inspired by Chinese lion dance and its history throughout Asia and Africa. There are shamanic dance forms that are informed by trance ritual and spirit channeling or repelling, Chinese lion dances scare away evil spirits. I wanted the deer dance to have that logic. I’ve been learning Kung Fu, so I brought some of that style to it, and Kyoko brought their Butoh experience.

I really connect with this sense of wanting to be seen, but the deep terror of it. We want to be recognized as special, worthy of attention, with a capacity for creative expression. With performance, people are looking at you, but they’re distracted. You’re triangulated in a way and it makes it feel safer.

Ironically, they’re looking at you, watching you ideally lose yourself disappearing into the work and then they disappear as well. We’re all looking to lose ourselves in this experience of witnessing—that’s what communal ritual is. I saw a line from Stanley Kubrick on Twitter that said he didn’t do drugs because he felt those experiences are for audiences. He essentially said, as a creator, your goal is to have that mystical experience through the work. The work is that trip. He was a champion of soberly engaging in your craft as a form of losing yourself on a journey. People always ask me if I do drugs. I’m like, “No, I’m such a control freak.” [laughs] I admit, the thing that I live for is being on set and marveling at the strangeness of what we’re making. It feels almost ritual in a[n Alejandro] Jodorowsky kind of way.

But also, we have no control over the journey of our work when it leaves us. Is it ours anymore? How do we make peace with that bastardization of our intent, or just being ignored for years? There’s no justice sometimes in the way we as artists live and give to the world what we have inside of us. At the same time, we make things regardless.

It takes an inner resourcefulness to survive these hardships and long desert periods of being misunderstood. And it also requires a spiritual strength and fortitude to do it anyway without rewards. Some people don’t survive that. Some are crushed by the financial burden of being an artist. Many of us make work as a form of survival. I had someone ask me, “Why are you always working?” I realized if I didn’t do it, I would feel buried alive.

Making is a form of survival but, at the same time, as I’ve gotten older, I also realize that living a life purely for that is a big mistake. Think about all of our most beloved creators—Jim Henson or [Hayao] Miyazaki—their personal lives are complicated and often marked by neglect. And there’s the capitalist demand that we continue our output.

I’m thinking of the D.W. Winnicott quote, “It is a joy to be hidden and disaster not to be found,” which feels so true of any creative person. At the same time, there is a bit of a disaster in being found! No matter what someone is making, they are putting their shit in the street that they don’t know about—not to mention the personal cost.

That’s what’s vulnerable about it—at least you had the guts to do it and to do it nakedly in front of other people. Our expectation to be seen or disappointment when we are not is the crushing part of existing as an artist. You have to hold both the criticism and the inner jackass to be like, “Fuck you,” when people give you shit for going out on a limb. We’re doing the art to figure ourselves out, put art as a message in a bottle to be witnessed. Celine Sciamma said, “Art is about the transmission of our intimacies,” which is a perfect quote.

I just happened to watch Adventures of Baron Munchausen and The Matrix back-to-back. In Baron Munchausen, Terry Gilliam uses classic images and makes them silly—but also magical. The Matrix aesthetics approach body horror, and there are no chinks in the armor of that movie in terms of its look. I realized your work combines these two concerns: magic and aesthetic. You turn the magnification way up when most people would just keep moving, making your work textured and dynamic. Your images are so deeply embodied they would be body horror—if they didn’t have beauty.

Those are two of my favorite movies. I love how they grapple with consciousness while materializing the illusory world in such a concrete, visually spectacular way. Both are about dreams and illusion, trusting or not trusting your senses. Baron Munchausen is only able to survive thanks to the help of his cohort. He’s this Don Quixote figure lost in his own fanciful dreams, the quintessential wandering fool. But he’s supposed to be this hero. What resonated with me most in Baron Munchausen was Sarah Polley, the orphaned girl, being like, “You’re supposed to save me. You’re supposed to save us, but you’re so lost.” It felt familiar as a kid, looking for help—and none comes.

Terry Gilliam was a huge puppetry influence. When I look at movies like Jabberwocky or The Fisher King, these creatures are so maximal that you’re not quite sure what you’re looking at. It’s like a hallucination. You can’t pinpoint where the head is or where the body ends. The overall effect is this jangling, textural, physical experience, like you’re watching a Hieronymus Bosch painting come alive. Baron Munchausen resonated with me as a kid because it was so maximalist. I had a very clear moment in my early career where I rejected minimalism. Minimalism is such a patriarchal idea. It’s so “No fun allowed.” I was attracted to things that were soft and tactile and pliable. That’s what I wanted to evoke.

I love watching older movies on the big screen for this reason. People have neck zits and imperfections. In Baron Munchausen, Sarah Polley’s teeth are fucked up and her lips are chapped and crusty. She’s a kid, so of course, but I feel like that is so rare now. Everything’s Disneyified.

There’s an essay called “Everyone Is Beautiful and No One Is Horny.” It talks about action heroes in movies between the ’80s and now, how back then people’s bodies were less perfect, but that there was more sexuality. Now, people’s bodies are perfect, but there’s something totally dead. Their bodies are perfect, but there’s nothing sexy about it.

You’re turning away from that sheen of perfection to do more performances and puppetry. How do you feel about moving toward live events?

Both a little scared and with the conviction that I have to do this as an answer to all the frustrations of filmmaking. Not only over financing and producing movies, but also what’s happening to images in general. It feels like it’s being attacked from both ends. I’m also interested in getting out of North America, out of the Anglo sphere to ways of channeling the Source with a capital S outside of the system that we’re all taught to operate in—which is hard in Los Angeles. I’m so rooted here. My family’s here, my friends are here, but I’m inspired to make cinema and things in other environments that are not so…

Fraught?

Or beaten down by capitalism. I’m interested in the body and performance because this is what we have left to work with. We don’t have the money for the crew and the lights. Let’s just get back to theater and writing because those are the things we can do with our own voice and hands.