Don't Hug Me Hug This is an interdisciplinary performance piece which channels the plastic excess and campy post-humanism of kawaii into the form a B-grade body horror film (think Hello Kitty meets They Came From Within). While seemingly disparate on the surface, kawaii and body horror are intimately linked in the way they both routinely rewire and abstract the human form into beguiling alien configurations that sit outside traditional representations of the body. Kawaii as a style entirely disregards humanistic ideals of the human form and instead adopts a cyborgian, neotenic doll-like figuration, opting for bulbous bug eyes, disproportionate limbs and bright blushing cheeks. Body horror similarly offers an alternative vision of the body, where the human form is continually abstracted into monstrously unrecognisable grotesqueries. Don't Hug Me Hug This overlays these two seemingly different aesthetic forms to illustrate how kawaii and body horror are similarly transgressive in the way they theatrically and humorously dismantle and reconfigure the body into something other.

Lying prostrate over a white clothed structure is a paper-mache figure frozen in a silent scream, which has been rendered in a rough, DIY aesthetic similar to the unconvincing special effects and props used in B-grade schlock horror. Bursting forth from the figure's flaky torso is a lumpy mass of phallic, withering tentacles adorned with kawaii styled cartoon eyes. Blushing and glossy kawaii maggots surround and feast upon the body. The abstract mass of pink kawaii viscera is activated by a puppeteer hidden within the clothed structure (which the paper-mache figure rests upon), making it lip-sync the words "don't hug me hug this" to a bombastic, pitch-shifted pop song loop. Once the song has finished, the soundtrack suddenly turns frightening and dramatic, and the puppeteer exits the clothed structure and silently leaves the gallery in a zombie-like manner.