HUGGING 'EXPERIMENT' SHAPES OF HUGGING JOY PLEASURE LAUGHTER

HUGGING 'EXPERIMENT' SHAPES OF HUGGING JOY PLEASURE LAUGHTER

Event poster titled "Shapes of Hiding" displaying purple and orange amorphous shapes on a black background. The poster includes details of an art event at Murray Edwards College on March 18, 2025, from 10:00 to 12:30, presented by the Arts and Creativity Research Group at the University of Cambridge, by Yuanting Qiu and Lushi Liu.

Joy As Activism

Joy, laughter, pleasure – those were the most frequently used words when participants talked about their experience in the Hugging Experiment: Shapes of Hugging (April 2025, Cambridge), an updated version of hugging workshops in collaboration with my PhD peer Lushi Liu.

Drawn upon adrienne maree brown’s Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good (2019), we created an embodied, affective space for participants to crash balloons filled with painting materials between their bodies, thus creating unique patterns of bodily encounters – not only between human bodies, but also between non-human bodies. Grass, trees, plastic sheets, colours…

At the same time, the question towards the uncontrollability of ‘experiment’ (which is the norm of research for many scientific domains) was also posed and pondered.

O btw, we are working on publications! Here is a potential future reference (work in progress):

Qiu, Y., & Liu, L. (forthcoming). Hugging as a Methodology: Rethinking ‘Experiment’ in Embodied Motion, Unpredictability, and Joy (working title). In Nguyễn, L. S., Singh, G., & Qiu, Y. (Eds.), Living and Loving as Research Methodologies. Routledge. 

Person smiling and playing outdoors with a large, semi-transparent plastic sheet in a grassy area, with a modern building and abstract sculpture in the background.
Group of people wearing white shirts with colorful paint splatters, gathered in a circle and looking down at the camera with smiling and joyful expressions against a bright blue sky.
Two women wearing white dresses with pink paint splatters, one of whom has a pink balloon attached to her waist, standing outdoors on a grassy area with trees and a building in the background.
A woman wearing a white painter's apron with colorful paint stains holds up a painted globe with a red string. Two women in similar aprons are in the background outside on a sunny day with trees and a building behind them.
Group of people wearing white aprons with colorful paint splatters, holding and throwing colorful balloons outdoors on a sunny day with trees and building in the background.

  • Linh Nguyên:

    Overcome with humility in opening ourselves to joy, beauty, and knowledge that we have absolutely no control over. This project was not about forcing an outcome or making a statement through a certain anticipated result. The statement was existing. Being is a powerful statement in itself. To bring forth being in such a live, visceral, joyful, colourful way reminds me of dragon-fire, and how much colour you can see in a flame.

  • Kevin Lim:

    splashes

    of colour

    under sky

    shouts

    of joy

    into space

    exploding love

    universe smiles

  • Dr Eleanor Dare:

    Unexpected Joy laughter freedom fun value of embodiment and connection being outside fireworks of texture and knowledge unfolding dance life vitality, a brilliant and important experiment countering the reduction of our lives to data points and goal

    Driven misery THANK YOU

  • Ed Parkhouse:

    Dancing on plastic, summoning the ghost of Barbara Hepworth, the undoing of spells with laughter. I showed everyone I know the video on the Spring equinox - turning the angle of the world with togetherness. Who could have known a hug could be so powerful

Two women hugging and smiling in a cozy room with a wooden table, plants, and artwork on the walls.
Decorated outdoor space with colorful Christmas lights, red curtains, and camouflage fabric ceiling, creating a festive atmosphere.
A blurred image of a woman dancing with arms outstretched in a dark setting, with Chinese text on the right side.