Andrew Thomas Huang

I grew up in Palos Verdes, California, a suburb of Los Angeles. My room looked out at an apricot tree and my neighbor’s fence. One of my earliest childhood nightmares was of Grimace from McDonalds staring at me through that very window.

That was always a slightly spooky part of the yard, but I loved it. It was mossy and quite beautiful. We had this old iron gate from the ’60s or ’70s that made it feel mysterious and magical. Even now, I’ll wake up sometimes not knowing where I am and for a second I’ll be back in my childhood bedroom, looking out that same old window.

As a kid, we had a cockatiel who ended up living for 25 years. We named them Woodstock after the bird from Peanuts, but I called them Woody. They would look straight back at you from across the room. I knew their vocalizations really intimately—I knew almost exactly what they were saying to me all the time. I think we’re gaslit into thinking we don’t really understand animals, but I actually think we do. In retrospect, I’m owning more of the clarity of that relationship.

In my late 20s. I definitely went through my post-Christian occult period. I was seeing a Jungian therapist and learning about Kabbalah and tarot, but I think I always did so through an anthropological lens. Then I started going back ancestrally. I remember seeing my elders practice ancestor worship as a kid. My mom would say, “Don’t pay attention to that, that’s the devil’s work.” And I’d think, “But it’s our family.” It took a long time to wrap my head around worshipping a plurality of ancestors, and toppling the idea of an omniscient, omnipotent God. Ancestors are flawed. You’re basically worshipping flawed relatives.

Saturn’s return in our late 20s is kind of a spiritual reckoning. It’s where personal injuries and breakups most often happen. Weirdly, that’s also when my career took off. I moved to London around that time and went through a major breakup. I got to know my hippie uncle. I was in his cabin and he was like, “Watch this tape.” Then he put on this ’70s spiritual film about the pagan origins of Christianity and sacred geometry. I remember thinking, “Okay, this framework I grew up believing is a farce. I’m going to restart my life.”

That’s when I began honing my spiritual voice, and I’ve never really stopped. I’ve been really blessed to collaborate with other spiritually conscious artists, and over time I became interested in how much crossover there is between West African and Asian religions: similar archetypes, similar divination systems, the mathematics of the Odu Ifá and the I Ching. It’s just fun. I really enjoy this stuff, and it’s never-ending.

One hundred percent. I like the term psychogeographies to describe this feeling. I was in Iceland a couple of weeks ago, and the landscape is a total mirror. Animism feels like a logical conclusion when you’re faced with the geology of a place. I revisited a spot where I filmed four years ago. It was a ghost waterfall, and I was amazed by how different it was. Where there had been a cavity, there was no longer one. What had been a really treacherous climb was now filled with boulders that had collapsed. It was a reminder of how completely kinetic the landscape is.

“Mutual Core” was fun and silly. It was like erotic rock porn—an animist pop video. But it was also a massive deal for me because I grew up listening to her music and watching who she collaborated with. Working with her was a dream, and she’s become an indomitable part of who I am and what I do. I’ve learned a lot from her about how to approach creation philosophically. And “Mutual Core” was ultimately a metaphor for relationships; it was about tectonic plates and friction, about eruptions being inevitable. So it’s spiritual, geological, and scientific, but it’s also about love.

As a kid, I loved metamorphosis stories and Disney fairytales where characters shapeshifted. There’s a theme that runs through European folklore called the “metamorphosis chase”: A loved one gets cursed by fairies, and in order to save them, their lover has to find them and hold onto them while the curse changes them into horrible things like snakes, burning coals, or monsters. One famous version is the Scottish fairy tale Tam Lin, where a woman has to hold onto a man while he transforms into a sequence of terrifying forms: a roaring lion, a venomous reptile, a scalding bar of iron. I think that’s what love is. It’s holding onto each other while we change and sometimes harm each other in the process. How long can we hold on?

Especially in a queer context, we’re constantly growing, shapeshifting, becoming. Queerness is constantly approaching a horizon. That’s what makes it political: We’re challenging systems we’re trapped in, which means being mutable. The question is how we love each other while we change and become more ourselves, because so many of us were denied that as children.

I think it’s changed my nature. My older work was much more visual-effects heavy and maximalist. My background is drawing and painting, and I built puppets as a kid. In my early 20s I had a very specific moment when I rejected minimalism. I thought minimalism was so grody and patriarchal, so I leaned heavily into maximalism. But it’s painstaking, and you need so much money to create those images. Now you can do it with a sentence using AI, and it makes you ask: “Why?”

I’m more conscious of the financial hardship and the waste now. You can have the coolest technology in the world, but if there’s no heart in it—no humanity—then what’s the point? I’ve been interested in theater lately, particularly in theater as ritual, and in approaching film in a more stripped-down way. I won’t say minimalist. But we have these incredible tools available to us while the world is also burning. I’m thinking about what it means to create inside that reality.

I was in Thailand, learning about the country for the first time. My husband is a climate scientist who studies native plants, so one of the first things I ask when I visit somewhere is: “What are the native species? What is indigenous to this place?” I spoke to sea nomads who live around the islands, and they told me they used to see deer swimming from the islands to the mainland. That got me researching deer species in Thailand. Then I visited the Chulalongkorn University Natural History Museum in Bangkok and learned about Schomburgk’s deer. I thought it was funny that it had this Western name. Why the fuck is it called Schomburgk’s deer? It had a Thai name, but it was ultimately named after a Western explorer. The deer was declared extinct in 1938, although there were rumors of sightings decades later.

The film is about having the courage to be reborn. It’s about having a past life, existing in the world with the wrong name, and having the courage to be reborn into something new on your own terms. That’s why I consciously cast a trans actress, someone who knew what it was like to have a past life. We found this amazing person named Nikki Phinyapincha. She’s not a trained actress, but she did such a good job because this was definitely more than just a role for her. She got it.

There’s a poem that goes something like: You give a child a flower or a butterfly, and the minute you tell them its name, it loses its mystery. Words are a form of magic, which is why naming is always important in fairy tales and folklore. If you name a demon, you can overcome it. Spiritually minded people understand that objects retain mystery, and that’s why objects have magic. I like to think objects emanate time and space. They don’t live in space, they are space. That’s why in the film I say deer create time. Deer have deer time.

Well, if we’re going to talk about futurisms, we have to look backward. I think we should also dispel the idea that technology has simply “advanced,” which is why I’m really interested in ancient technologies. I was recently in Athens and went to an ancient Greek technology museum. The Greeks had alarm clocks, automatic doors, alarm systems, and ways of communicating across long distances through hydraulic, fire, and water mechanisms. They built an alarm clock using clay pots. Water would trickle until it triggered a whistle at whatever time you wanted. They had temple doors where you would light a fire that controlled a hydraulic mechanism underground, and the doors would open like the gods had spoken. I recently befriended the artist Riar Rizaldi, who made an amazing film about Sufi mystics in Java arriving at ideas around quantum physics long before the West.

I’m not sure what posthuman really means. But I am interested in transhumanism, especially its popularity in the tech world and in queer circles—this conviction that we can modify our bodies. I believe queer people and disabled people deserve the capacity to improve our lives and change our bodies to match our identities. Donna Haraway wrote A Cyborg Manifesto in the ’80s, and 40 years later it feels more relevant than ever. We apparently have microplastics in our brains, and we’re hardwired to our phones, so maybe that makes us posthuman. But we’re also still human. We’re messy as fuck. We’re ruining the planet. We’re flawed and looking for love, and we all want a warm body to hold us at night. I don’t think there’s anything “post” about us.

I feel like I’m on a lifelong journey to know my body better and to understand all the things it’s trying to tell me—to decode the mystery of our genetics. I saw something recently about polyvagal theory and the voice, the idea that the quality of your voice doesn’t lie. We can somatically sense when someone is being incongruent or inauthentic. Your voice can betray whether you’re telling the truth or being yourself.

I think about this all the time, especially in my love life. There’s a book called Sex at Dawn that argues humans have lived within very different family structures for most of our existence, and that more patriarchal, monogamous structures arose alongside agriculture. It also talks about bonobos, our close genetic relatives. They all fuck each other. They’re very nonviolent. If we accept that we are animals and collapse the human-animal distinction, then the structures we use to define families and relationships can all be called into question.

I think queer people challenge these systems because we’re constantly collapsing categories. We’re used to being illegible, especially people who are gender-nonconforming or trans. We don’t fit into clean categories. Living illegibly is hard, but it can also be liberating. You have to create space for yourself. That means having an eternally punk way of existing. It’s hard, it’s lonely, but it’s also rich with possibility.

Sometimes I watch videos on Instagram and see animals with these really cushy lives, with the most loving caretakers. But maybe it would be nice to come back as an octopus, something very wild. That would be fun.

I think it would be best used as compost for a tree or as food for fish or whatever. As long as it’s being put to use instead of rotting in a box.