I'm Hugh. I'm a Vietnamese-American artist, astrologer, occultist, designer, researcher, and linguaphile. I'm based currently on the occupied lands of the western United States, and for most of my life grew up in the Salt Lake Valley in Utah, indigenous lands of the Ute, the Paiute, the Goshute, and the Shoshone Nations.
I was a dancer, and my artistic background had its roots in the performance arts. I have formally studied a BFA in visual arts with a graphic design emphasis from the University of Utah, as well as a minor in Classical studies with a Classical Latin emphasis.
However, my work at its heart is intersectional and multi-disciplinary, and I still consider myself a life-long student and eager autodidact. I love a good challenge and I believe in the value of good craft. A key mission of mine is to utilize my formal design training to create high-quality tools and resources for other serious seekers, professionals, and full-on accomplices in the fields of astrological research, language, and occulture.
I was formerly a board member of the non-profit Association for Young Astrologers (AYA), have done professional creative work for the Astrology Podcast, the Oraculos School Astrology, the Celestial Arts Education Library (CAELi), and Idola Stellarum.
I am deeply fascinated by languages— particularly how words, symbols, and scripts bridge divides across time, cultures, and societies to bring philosophical and esoteric insight to contemporary challenges.
Outside of my usual astrological work, I love to cook and I have quite an experimental approach to food, striving to add color and richness to a lifestyle very much oriented towards physical and mental well-being. I'd like to think my edge-lord days are (mostly) over, and try to maintain a general attitude of Sagittarian hilarity and openness as a counterbalance to the hours spent with the very dense and obscure subjects dear to me.
I am personally commited to the intentional practice of coming to know oneself and maintaining balance in all the things I do.
Of the things I do, I have a personal commitment to rigor and a thirst for nuance in all of my pursuits. I like setting goals, achieving them, and helping people achieve their own goals.
However, whether it be in astrology and mysticism or in art and design, the common through-line that defines my work is an aspiration to bridge the rational and methodical with childlike play and a spirit of Discovery.
I am a firm believer in Doing the Work™, and to do it well is a lifetime's worth of work, indeed. I can only hope my documentation, release, and reflections about this Work as reflected here and on other platforms can be but an entryway if not a torch of inspiration to encourage people to take the next steps within their own Work.
I am an advocate for free thinking, encourage a healthy respect for the material modern sciences, and encourage personal discernment as foundational tools in the way I operate.
I am vehemently against dogma in all of its forms. While I respect tradition and the foundations it establishes, I strive to never never allow my thinking to be burdened by mindless appeal to antiquity or purely orthodox methodologies for its own sake.
The Frog to me is both a personal animal familiar and a symbol. As an amphibious creature, they are inherently liminal in their nature, able to survive on both land and water. They mirror a dynamic I've observed regularly expressing in my life: always in the middle between many seemingly "opposed" pairs. I understand, for instance, how it feels to stand between notions of "East" and "West", between the orthodox and the apocryphal, and many such dichotomies.
The frog is a queer symbol, mutable by nature, and it has been traditionally been associated in popular consciousness as a symbol of witches—magical practitioners largely queered by their host society. The embrace of my own queerness is central to my own journey of self-discovery.
This is why I want to ensure people from diverse backgrounds, ethnicities, genders and sexual orientations to feel safe around me and my work. I will always seek to empower queer and marginalized people where possible.
Unfortunately, the existence of this antifascist frog implies the existence of fascist ones out there, the likes of which I have no tolerance for. The need to state this in more explicit terms— despite being generally shitty and worrisome— is necessary:
My work is not welcome to people who sympathize with fascists or subscribe to fascist ideology. I am opposed to fascism all too prevalent in the occult.
As a recovering materialist, I embrace a cosmological framework that recognizes the world as living and animated, with everything in creation imbued with innate consciousness and intelligence. This defines not only the work I do, but how I navigate the world around me.
Walking a path that recognizes an inherent interconnectedness of the myriad beings and peoples of natural world, I've come to recognize the necessity of responsibility to that interconnectedness.
The frog is a multifaceted avatar for the pluralism, heterodoxy, and the Sacred Fool. It is intentionally silly, just like being a living being in this weird, silly World.