i don’t like hugs, but
Cecily Gong
See it On Campus: Level 1
I don’t like hugs, but is a mixed media installation I have been working on over the last year. It has been transformed, lived in, repaired, and adorned over time. At its core is an exploration of softness.
Softness in my work is not just a texture or an aesthetic, but a language, position, and form of resistance. It is about making a choice to be vulnerable in a world that often demands hardness, about creating space for care, grief, and tenderness without guilt. Softness to me is one of the strongest forms of strength and power.
The bedroom, a recurring space in my work, is a place where I find both trauma and comfort. Squeezing coils out of clay with my hands and smoothing it out all at the end felt like a gesture of healing, mending at care.
I want to construct and decorate my world with both softness and strength, so that my soft spot can become something that I embrace, to fight with, to protect with, and to care with. Not as weaknesses, but as grounds for connection and resilience.
I’m in process with building my world. I will keep building it, decorating it, tending it and adorning it as I change too.
I don’t like hugs, but, I want to offer this space of suppleness to others as well because I need it too.
Thinking about softness has informed the way I see the world interpersonally, politically, and visually. I blend the past and future together using softness. I imagine a world where we are not restricted by the harshness of the capital, where we are allowed to be grounded and changing constantly.
Embodying softness, I want to be the ground where things can grow, a vessel that holds, and a surface that can record my fingertips, moments, conversations, ideas, and feelings. Not just for myself, but also for people that I care for, even when my body turns into the ground- malleable, meltable, breakable, porous.
my main mediums:
My work is a reflection of these ideas, translated into intimate installations that resemble a bedroom: a space for memory, care, and the preservation of fragments. I work across various materials, such as ceramics, paintings, beeswax, metal, and others.
installation view
installed at The Show
past installations
Student exhibitions- a soft spot, 2025
encaustic
Wax exists in a state of in-between. It is fluid yet can be solidified, delicate yet archival. Like clay, wax becomes a symbol for transformation: it shifts states, responds to heat and touch, and holds the memories of what it once was. I am drawn to how wax can gently encase objects, seal porous surfaces, and hold memory within its layers, all while remaining open and vulnerable to change. Building up translucent layers, embedding fragments, and revealing or obscuring what lies beneath, mirrors how we carry personal and collective histories. It offers a way of thinking through grief, tenderness, and emotional complexity not as fixed or fully graspable, but as something layered over time.
There is an intimacy in the material itself as well. Its warmth, scent, and skin-like texture invite a bodily closeness and sensory engagement that resonates with the quiet, emotional language of my practice. In using wax and encaustics, I aim to create spaces where softness is not dismissed or overlooked, but instead given form, weight, and presence. It becomes a way of holding contradiction—of offering strength through gentleness, and of affirming that softness is not a lack, but a radical, enduring form of resilience.
Paintings
My paintings are an extension of how I visualize the world. I paint spaces where shape, memory, and emotion blur into one another through form & colour. These imagined objects become almost tangible. They are rooted in a sketching practice that values looking softly: the incomplete, the gestural, the remembered. Painting, for me, is where dreams and the unconscious find form. Softness becomes abstract, not just in pastel or gentle lines, but in the openness of interpretation, in the refusal to harden into something fixed.
My compositions often begin as impressions. I let flickers of feelings or fleeting images evolve. This process mirrors my personal relationship to memory: something impermanent, shifting, and often unreliable. In this way, my paintings are not just visual artifacts but archives that are residual, intimate, and constantly changing. They live in a place where I grasp onto what slips away. The act of painting itself becomes a gesture of care, of tending to what I cannot always articulate in words or comprehend.
ceramics
Ceramics grounds me and my practice literally and emotionally. Clay holds memory in its surface. It remembers every touch, temperature, repair. Working with it is being in and with my body and choosing to slow down & care over perfection. I shape vessels and build forms not just to hold things, but to hold feelings, stories, and the process.
Ceramics has taught me that softness is not weakness. Clay is strongest when it’s soft. It becomes fragile when it’s subjected to intense heat and pressure. It still carries traces of every touch. Working with clay reminds me to go back in time and to remember what it feels to hold something soft and strong at the same time. In many ways, my practice is about this balance—being soft enough to feel, strong enough to carry, and open enough to keep changing.
Thank you for spending time in my world. I hope it offers you a place to pause, reflect, and maybe even soften too.
Past Works
