The network for creativity
Join 1.25M professional creatives like you
Connect with clients, get discovered, and run your business 100% commission-free
Creatives on Contra have earned over $150M and we are just getting started
Back to feedPost
Welcome to Letters from Hio, or Kat🌿
or: why a Vietnamese woman is writing about Japanese mythology and twin flames at 10pm every night in Tokyo. Dunno. Why then?
Hi. I’m Katherine. Or that Kat, KitKat. Or Hio.
I’m a Vietnamese old lady, currently living in Setagaya-Tokyo and working at a company I won’t name here. But can you imagine someone with an Interior Design degree and a deep obsession with ancient mythology sitting down to answer real estate emails at 9am. Yes. Exactly like that. Boring slave life.
But that’s just the day job.
Every other waking hour, I write this.
Letters from Hio is where I put everything I can’t stop thinking about into one place:
🏯 Japanese mythology and history:
Particularly the ancient kingdom of Izumo where the gods were apparently having very dramatic political disputes thousands of years ago and honestly I relate to every single one of them. This is where my soul originated from.
🌿 Life in Japan as a perfect outsider:
Not the “oh my god the konbini” kind, absolutely NOT. But well, actually, konbini is genuinely incredible and I will die defending the seasonal stuffs, so let’s say: not only that kind but also the strange and quietly devastating parts of actually living here.
Full disclosure: I moved to Tokyo partly chasing a man who is my twinflame. His name is Mr Saito. We are depending on the week or seasonally, either a love story for the ages or a very elaborate lesson in patience when he comes back to his bitch self. The point is I’m here now, with a lease and strong feelings about Japanese stationery and I AM NOT leaving.
This section is about all of it. The beautiful parts, the lonely parts and the parts where you’re standing in a konbini at midnight eating a 7-Eleven strawberry cream sandwich and thinking: how did I end up here, and why does this sandwich taste like it was made by someone who loves me deep deeply?
🔮 Spirituality, aura reading, and the twin flame journey
I’m a practicing diviner and aura reader currently deep in a twin flame experience that I will absolutely tell you about once I’ve had enough tea to be coherent about it.
And my favourite part is that all three collapse into each other. Like, when I realised that the Izumo philosophy of en-musubi and the concept of twin flames are describing the same thing, just in different languages and separated by a few thousand years.
Which is also, not coincidentally, what my book is about.
My Tiny Love Story is a memoir I’m writing about the most confusing but most beautiful wrecking thing that has ever happened to me: meeting my twin flame. His name is obviously Mr Saito. I am not going to summarise what twin flames are right now because that would take the rest of this welcome post and frankly you deserve a proper explanation, not a footnote.
What I will say is this: it’s a story about two people, a connection that doesn’t follow any rules I was prepared for. It is what happens when you start pulling that thread and realise it leads all the way back through mythology, past lives and every spiritual tradition you thought you understood.
It started as something I was writing just for myself. It became something I think about on the train, in the shower, and at 2:22am when I should absolutely be sleeping. I’ll be sharing pieces of the process here: the research, the realisations, the moments where I have to put everything down and just sit with what I’ve uncovered.
The paid section of this newsletter is in many ways where the book is being written in real time.
I don’t know what brought you here. Maybe you love Japan. Maybe you’re on your own spiritual path and needed somewhere to land. Maybe you just stumbled in from a Google search and something made you stay.
Whatever the reason — welcome to Hio. Pull up a chair. There’s tea.
Kat
Or Hio.
The network for creativity
Join 1.25M professional creatives like you
Connect with clients, get discovered, and run your business 100% commission-free
Creatives on Contra have earned over $150M and we are just getting started
Trending
retrofuturism
Share your favorite designs from the past exploring the distant future. Or your own take on the aesthetic 🚀
halftone
Dots. Texture. Grain. Let's see your designs using the halftone technique.
Midjourney
Creatives are showing off what they're making with Midjourney.
colorgrade
Video editors sound off: How do you enhance the mood of your video in color grading?
Related posts
Title: The Archive Painting to Avant-Garde Fashion Collection.
The Archive Painting is an avant-garde fashion collection that recontextualizes Japanese painting archives from the Met Museum, translating centuries-old brushwork into contemporary textile design.
Reinterprets these historical artworks through the lens of modern material exploration, moving beyond traditional display to embed the paintings directly into the fabric of fashion. By utilizing a diverse range of textile techniques—from the softness of cotton and the luxury of silk to the structure of brocade, the tactility of hand-painted leather, and the precision of laser-etched denim—the collection creates a dialogue between antiquity and industry.
The collection is grounded in a cohesive aesthetic that bridges the heritage of Japanese art with the raw energy of Tokyo’s small-town streets. The contrast between the archival imagery and the avant-garde silhouettes creates a unique visual identity, positioning each piece as both wearable art and a sculptural artifact.
The goal was to make the collection feel timeless yet disruptive—a modern interpretation of craft that connects the historical museum archive with the dynamic, subcultural energy of contemporary Tokyo.
Check the project here. (App Flora Canvas)
Check the original art | Met Museum (Japanese Paintings)
Recovering the Stolen Jewel from the Palace of the Dragon King is a piece by: Utagawa Kuniyoshi
really like how everything moves i keep on looking at different details each time
🔱 The Nataraja doesn't just depict a dance — it encodes the entire operating system of the universe in a single frozen gesture.
⚛️ In 2004, CERN — the European Center for Nuclear Research — placed a 2-meter Nataraja statue at their particle physics headquarters in Geneva. The plaque reads: "For the modern physicists, Shiva's dance is the dance of subatomic matter." The physicists didn't adopt the symbol. They recognized it.
🏛️ ANANDA TANDAVA: THE PARTICLE DANCE — my submission for the FLORA Museum Challenge.
I started with the Chola-dynasty Nataraja bronze (ca. 11th century) from The Metropolitan Museum of Art's Open Access archive — one of the most iconic sculptures in all of art history.
The original bronze encodes Shiva's five cosmic acts — the Panchakritya — in one pose: the drum creates, the flame destroys, the open palm preserves, the planted foot embodies, the raised foot liberates. Five acts. One gesture. One eternal dance.
🥁 SRISHTI (Creation) — The damaru drum strikes and particles erupt outward like a CERN collision event. Galaxies coalesce from the spray. The first sound becomes the first matter.
🔵 STHITI (Preservation) — Stable orbits, DNA spirals, and sacred geometry hold the universe in perfect equilibrium. The open palm says: fear not.
🔥 SAMHARA (Dissolution) — The agni flame expands into cosmic fire. Stars collapse into black holes. Matter decays into entropy. Beautiful destruction.
🌫️ TIRODHANA (Concealment) — Shiva deliberately veils himself. The figure is there but hidden behind dark matter and digital noise. The divine made invisible — the way 95% of the universe is invisible to us.
✨ ANUGRAHA (Liberation) — The fog lifts. The full Nataraja emerges in absolute clarity, composed of CERN bubble-chamber particle trails and cosmic light. The raised foot breaks through. Grace.
I built each act as a panel on FLORA, then animated them into a cinematic sequence — from golden creation through blue equilibrium, crimson fire, grey concealment, and finally into transcendent light.
The Chola sculptors understood the cosmos a thousand years before we had particle accelerators. I just changed the rendering engine.
"What if the most advanced diagram of the universe was cast in bronze a millennium ago — and we're only now catching up?"
Original artwork:
Shiva as Lord of Dance (Nataraja), Chola period, ca. 11th century
Copper alloy
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Built with @floraai
#FLORAMuseum #FLORA #TheMet #Nataraja #Panchakritya #CosmicDance #IndianArt #SanatanDharma #AIArt #DigitalArt #CERN #ParticlePhysics
wow!