Based on the seating capacity of the Research Festival venue, I will prepare 40 handmade “squeeze balls” (stress-relief tactile objects) for participants. Each ball is constructed with a TPR outer shell and filled with a mixture of slime and soft clay, combined with small inserted components (such as mini building blocks, ceramic pellets, imitation rice grains, or miniature faux biscuits). The variation of internal materials produces different tactile feedback, allowing each squeeze ball to evoke a unique sensation when held, pressed, or kneaded.
Critical Reflection: Painting as Affirmation
10–12 min performative talk – refined with embodied-theoretical connections
Before speaking
You’ll find a small soft object placed on your seat.
Please, pick it up and hold it in your hand.
Feel its texture —
without naming it.
Maybe it’s cold, or sticky, or strangely resistant.
Don’t analyse it — just notice.
Because this presentation is not only about touch —
it is also meant to be touched.
I want our bodies to listen together.
Part 1 — Introducing the Research (≈2 min)
My name is Jiarui Yan, or Gaga.
My research explores touch as both a material and conceptual medium in painting.
In art history, vision has always dominated —
we see, we interpret, we analyse.
But I ask: what happens when painting begins with contact?
When skin, pigment, and canvas meet,
the boundary between artist and material dissolves.Each mark becomes an imprint of presence —
a record of movement, emotion, and memory.
For me, that contact is also cultural.
As an East Asian woman painting in a Western context,
every gesture carries the history of how my body has been looked at and disciplined.
Painting becomes a way of unlearning that gaze —
of reclaiming my body’s capacity to define itself through touch.
Part 2 — Practice & Process (≈3–4 min)
In my studio, I often paint with my hands —
no brushes, no tools, just skin against pigment.
The gestures, the flow, the stains —they’re not accidents.
They are negotiations between my body and the surface.
Sometimes, the paint pushes back.
It resists my movement, dries too fast, or swallows a colour I wanted to keep.
In those moments, I think of Irigaray,
who describes touch as a relation between two beings —
neither dominating, nor disappearing.
When I press my hand into the paint,it’s not about control;
it’s a conversation of pressure and yielding.
Irigaray helps me recognise that this resistance is intimacy —
a recognition that both the body and the material have their own agency.
Through this process, I also think of Butler —
her idea that norms are repeated but can be repeated differently.
Each brushstroke, each gesture, is a repetition.
I’ve been taught, as a woman, to paint “carefully,” “beautifully,” “politely.”
So I repeat those movements — but I misalign them,
I paint too fast, too thick, too much.
That small disobedience becomes visible on the surface —
a feminist act written in colour and gesture.
When I work on my BUT series,
I layer oil and pastel until the surface almost breaks.
I scrape it back, leave fragments of previous layers visible.
These broken textures record the tension between self-erasure and assertion.
In Butler’s terms, it’s the repetition that shifts meaning —the same movement, but with a different intention each time.
And in Self-Portrait with Untitled,I began with my own image,
then slowly blurred and overpainted it until the face disappeared.
This act wasn’t about hiding —
it was about refusing the demand to be fully legible.It echoes bell hooks’ idea of the oppositional gaze —
that sometimes, to not be entirely seen is an act of protection, of agency.
Part 3 — Theoretical Grounding (≈3 min)
My work also engages with Rosi Braidotti’s affirmative ethics.
Braidotti speaks of the body not as fixed identity,
but as becoming — a continual transformation shaped by relation.
In painting, this means allowing the work to change me as I make it.
The paint doesn’t just respond to me —
it teaches me how to touch, how to slow down, how to let go.
This is what I call painting as affirmation:
not celebrating what I already know,
but trusting the process of becoming through contact.
When I paint with my body —
feeling the cool weight of pigment, the slight stickiness of oil —
I begin to understand Braidotti’s ethics physically.
Affirmation is not comfort; it’s endurance,
a willingness to stay present with what resists you.
The material world pushes back,
and yet that push is what allows a new form of subjectivity to emerge.
In this sense, theory is not something I “apply” to painting.
It moves through my hand,
it lives in the friction between gesture and thought,skin and canvas.
The studio becomes a feminist site of knowledge —
a place where theory is made tactile.
Part 4 — Closing: From Subject–Object to Subject–Subject (≈2 min)
As I’ve been speaking, your hands have been doing something —
pressing, squeezing, maybe just holding still.
That movement is already part of this presentation.
It’s your body responding to mine —
to my voice, to the rhythm of the room, to the silence between words.
And this, to me, is what I mean by a dialogue between subjects.
Not me telling you something,
but our bodies co-existing, sensing together,
touching through attention.
Touch isn’t only what happens on the surface of the skin —
it’s a way of being with others.
Thank you.