1 month ago
23
In-demand Chinese-American music video director and visual artist Andrew Thomas Huang has been at the forefront of the avant-garde pop landscape for years, with nearly 100,000 followers on his Instagram account to show for it.
He’s collaborated with Icelandic songstress Bjork for more than a decade and picked up a Grammy nomination for his spectacular 2019 music video for English singer-songwriter FKA Twigs’ track Cellophane. More recently, he directed a telenovela-inspired clip for girl group phenomenon Katseye filming their 2025 banger Gabriela complete with a cameo from Jessica Alba.
The avatar – a digital projection of Turandot – created by Andrew Thomas Huang.
His latest artistic foray is something quite different as he makes his opera debut as video designer for Opera Australia’s new production of Puccini’s Turandot. Huang is quick to admit he’s a newbie to the art form, describing his knowledge of it as “pretty much nothing.”
“I’m brand new to it,” says Huang on the phone from Los Angeles. “But I think just acquainting myself I’ve fallen in love with it. The grandeur, the raw emotion. There’s an emotional electricity that runs through the format of opera that makes it a very direct, visceral experience.”
Andrew Thomas Huang’s The Beast of Jade Mountain: Queen Mother of the West was commissioned for last year’s Biennale of Sydney.
Huang, who initially studied in fine art and animation, was handpicked by Ann Yee, the Chinese-American director helming the new Turandot, to craft a digital virtual avatar which would be both futuristic and rooted in ancient Chinese ancestry for the upcoming show. Yee had been a fan of the Cellophane music video before she even knew it was Huang’s work, but it was his strikingly grand sculpture, The Beast of Jade Mountain: Queen Mother of the West (西王母), commissioned for last year’s Biennale of Sydney, that convinced her he was the perfect person for the task.
“We were like, oh my god, if we could get that guy that would be amazing,” says Yee, who is making her Australian debut as a director, having previously directed Rusalka at the Royal Opera House and worked across theatre, musical theatre and opera in directing and choreography.
After moves were made to reach out to Huang through a contact she was delighted to hear he was interested in coming onboard for her modern take on the Puccini classic. “[Huang] does a lot of visual, fantastical, imaginative world-building. His works have a lot of questions about identity, which was crucial in defining and creating the avatar.”
Björk, The Gate, album artwork.Credit: Courtesy Andrew Thomas Huang
In Puccini’s opera, Princess Turandot sets three riddles for any suitors wanting to marry her and failure to solve the cryptic questions ends in execution. The reason for Turandot’s reluctance to wed stems from a vow to honour her ancestor, Princess Lou-Ling, who was raped and murdered by a conquering prince.
While the princess is often characterised as a cold-hearted ice queen, in Yee’s version her psychology is made more complex drawing on ideas of intergenerational trauma.
‘She never said there’s a prize if you can win my hand. She’s been super clear. What’s the opera like when you look at it like that?’
Ann Lee, director“The first thing [Turandot] says when she sings is, this is why I am the way I am, I house the soul of my ancestress, who was sexually assaulted and murdered and whose kingdom was stolen from her, and I am keeping her memory alive,” says Yee. “So all these descriptors of her, she’s a man-hater, she’s cold-hearted … she never said come on over. She never said there’s a prize if you can win my hand. She’s been super clear. What’s the opera like when you look at it like that?”
“I don’t want to have the conversation where she’s an ice queen and she’s a man-eater – it’s been done. I was able to have a conversation with our first Turandot [Rebecca Nash], who’s played the role multiple times, and she is over the moon with this idea. She’s like, it’s just going to unlock so much in the piece.”
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Key to the fresh perspective is the avatar Huang has created, a digital projection of Turandot to communicate to her people, but to protect herself too. The pre-rehearsal renders of the avatar show a majestic silver visage, beautiful but formidable. She wears an ornate headpiece drawn from research on Chinese headdresses, as well as on ancient Chinese symbols and iconography.
“Ann was very explicit that she wanted this figure to be like an armoured figure,” says Huang. “It’s a mask for this ruler. So much of the story is about Turandot’s emotional armour with the arrival of these multiple suitors who try to marry her, so we need this avatar to be a hardened surface, to be her defence. I wanted it to feel ancient and futuristic and emotionally imposing and grand at the same time.”
It’s not Huang’s first experience in creating avatars, having crafted one for Bjork, a persona that she could use in interviews, as well as in music videos and games.
Andrew Thomas Huang is making his opera debut.
For Yee, the avatar in Turandot is also a reflection on what we are all doing on a smaller scale with technology. “I wanted to accentuate how much we are empowering this two-dimensional world of screens and internet and social media, I wanted to make it as big as possible in the space,” says Yee.
“[Turandot] is using it like a shield, but it is also our mode of communication – in more unhealthy ways than healthy ways. I definitely have questions of it and I feel like it’s the right tension for this conversation. This conversation is on a basic level, we suffer trauma, we divorce ourselves from our corporeal selves to protect and survive, and therefore we have to create some kind of armour to help get us through that. That’s the avatar.”
The consideration of the ongoing impacts of trauma is also echoed within the planned set design and costumes. The opera is not set in a specific time period, but within a “psychological space”, where the characters will be contemporarily clothed and the avatar will be projected.
“[It’s] a claustrophobic space that is mostly white, greyish, with this black materiality on the floor that oozes up the sides of the wall and there’s an ombre to the costumes, this black also coming up the costumes,” says Yee. “It’s the pain overwhelming the world.”
Yee also plans to more heavily spotlight the character of Turandot’s ancestor, Lou-Ling, who is usually not cast, only sung about by Turandot.
Ann Yee in rehearsal for Rusalka, The Royal Opera in 2023Credit: Camilla Greenwell
“I wanted to manifest her so that the audience had something real to connect with in her. So when the opera opens, we’ve cast a contemporary dancer [Hoyori Maruo as Lou-Ling], her performance will open in silence, it will represent the pain. And then the singer [of Turandot] comes out and will wrap her arms around her, calm her and pull her back into the darkness.”
The new production also premieres on the 100-year anniversary of the opera with Turandot having opened at Milan’s historic Teatro alla Scala in 1926. When asked about the reason for its longevity, Yee jokingly replies that its “banging tunes” have been theorised to her as one possible reason for its enduring place in the canon. Nessun dorma has certainly cemented its place as one of the most recognisable arias in opera.
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For Huang, he was first struck by the humanity within the tale. “In Ann’s particular interpretation, I just love that this is a story about this ruler who ultimately has to learn to surrender to love. Being haunted by something that is a barrier to love, I think, is a very human story.”
Huang has found traversing from the world of contemporary music to opera doesn’t require that much of a change in approach as one might imagine. “We’re trying to tell a story driven by music, that feels incredibly familiar to me,” says Huang. “It’s right up my alley. The only difference is it’s being sung in Italian and I don’t always understand what they’re saying.”
Opera Australia’s Turandot is at Sydney Opera House from January 15 to March 27.
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