Participatory Performance · Painting Without Brushes · Artistic Research
Co-developed with
Yuanting Qiu
Location
Murray Edwards College, University of Cambridge, UK Faculty of Educaiton, University of Cambridge, UK
Year
2025
The Shape of Hugging emerged from a collaboration between Yuanting Qiu's research into hugging and my artistic exploration of materiality, embodiment, and participatory painting.
I introduced and developed the paint-filled balloon approach, through which bodies, paint, balloons, and unpredictable material ruptures co-create paintings without brushes. Rather than representing a predetermined shape, the work explores how the shape of a hug emerges through these material encounters.
The Shape of Hugging · Participatory workshop, Murray Edwards College, University of Cambridge, 2025.
01 / AN ENCOUNTER
Dear visitor, may I ask you something?
What is the shape of a hug?
We have been hugging all our lives.
We hug to express affection, to offer comfort, to celebrate, or simply to feel the presence of another.
Yet, have we ever wondered what shape an embrace might take?
What if a hug could become a painting?
What if our bodies, rather than brushes, could leave traces of an encounter?
And what if the painting could never be fully anticipated or controlled?
These questions became the starting point for The Shape of Hugging, a participatory artistic research project co-developed by Lushi Liu and Yuanting Qiu at Murray Edwards College, University of Cambridge.
Drawing on my background in visual art and my interest in experimental artistic practices, I wanted to explore hugging not simply as a gesture to be represented, but as an artistic process in itself.
What might emerge when an embrace becomes a way of making art?
02 / PROCESS
Painting Without Brushes
This is a hug. This is a painting. This is a painting without brushes.
The painting begins with a balloon.
Participants fill it with their chosen colours of paint and water. There is no predetermined palette, no single correct mixture, and no prescribed image to reproduce.
The balloon is then inflated, becoming a fragile container of colour, liquid and pressure.
Two participants put on protective aprons and place the balloon between their bodies.
Then, they embrace.
The Shape of Hugging · Participatory workshop, Murray Edwards College, University of Cambridge, 2025.
As their bodies move closer, the balloon is squeezed, stretched and deformed.
Sometimes, it bursts almost immediately.
Sometimes, it stubbornly refuses.
The participants may adjust their movements, change the pressure or try again.
Until, at a moment that cannot be fully predicted—
Bang!
The balloon bursts.
Paint splashes across the aprons, leaving unexpected marks, colours and patterns.
A painting has emerged without a brush.
Yet no one could have known exactly what it would look like.
The Shape of Hugging · Participatory workshop, Murray Edwards College, University of Cambridge, 2025.
The participants could choose the colours, the amount of water, the pressure of their embrace and the way their bodies moved. But they could not entirely determine when the balloon would burst, how the paint would travel or what traces would remain.
The embrace becomes the gesture. The rupture becomes the brushstroke. The encounter becomes the painting.
03 / AGENCY
Who Is Painting?
If no one can fully control the painting, who — or what — is the artist?
The person who initiates the embrace?
The body that responds?
The balloon that stretches and bursts?
The paint that splashes, flows and settles?
Or the encounter through which all these elements come into relation?
The Shape of Hugging · Participatory workshop, Murray Edwards College, University of Cambridge, 2025.
In The Shape of Hugging, painting is no longer understood as the expression of a single artist's intention.
It emerges through the unpredictable relationships between bodies, materials, movements and forces.
The participants do not simply impose their intentions upon passive materials. Nor do the materials act independently of the bodies that embrace them.
Instead, the painting takes shape through their entanglement.
What remains is more than an image of a hug.
It is a material trace of an encounter that cannot be repeated in exactly the same way.
The Shape of Hugging · Participatory workshop, Murray Edwards College, University of Cambridge, 2025.
Perhaps the painting does not belong to any one of them.
Perhaps it emerges through their encounter.
04 / WHEN THINGS REFUSE TO FOLLOW THE PLAN
When Things Refuse to Follow the Plan
What happens when an experiment begins to escape its own design?
When we brought The Shape of Hugging to an academic conference at the University of Cambridge, the balloon pump stopped working.
Participants began inventing their own approaches. Some inflated the balloons before painting their surfaces. Others began to dance, improvise and experiment with unexpected gestures.
The workshop took on a life of its own.
The Shape of Hugging · Participatory workshop at the Cambridge Kaleidoscope Conference, 2025.
One participant told us that they had never imagined a conference could take such a form.
Perhaps we were not simply bringing artistic practice into a conference, but experimenting with what a conference could become.
And yet, not everything unfolded as we had imagined.
Some participants began writing words onto their paintings. Others picked up brushes and pens, introducing new gestures and intentions into the process.
The Shape of Hugging · Participatory workshop at the Cambridge Kaleidoscope Conference, 2025.
