Touch as a method: Unfolding the play of the field and the publicization of intimate experiences.
 

 Free Touch is an ongoing artistic practice initiated by artist Chou Kuan-Jou in the aftermath of Taiwan’s 2023 #MeToo movement, aimed at exploring the boundaries between body and space. Set in public spaces such as plazas, stadiums, parks, and markets, the project invites strangers to engage in one-on-one, consensual touch to ask: What is public touch?

Since 2024, Free Touch has traveled through four countries, thirteen locations, and engaged forty participants. Touch, as a medium that manifests the interconnectedness of all things, becomes a way—through the sensory perception of skin—to shape or dissolve boundaries, to include or separate the self from the other.
Through the touch between artist, participant, bystander, and site, Free Touch manifests a presence that exceeds the here and now. It opens a blurred space within the public sphere—one that holds both public gaze and private exploration.

Within the tactile-driven world of Free Touch, Chou Kuan-Jou’s body becomes a neutral, transparent, and fluid medium—yet one that retains a strong sense of self. Carrying history and lived experience, the body offers a constrained openness, allowing the visible and invisible, the human and non-human, to penetrate and leave their traces. The flesh, as a convergence of time and space, mirrors the public realm itself. In asking what public touch means, the work also asks: How do I exist in relation to it?