People
in Nottingham are being invited to hug a total stranger - all in the
name of art.
Renowned Chinese artists the Gao brothers will stage their first
British World Hug Day performance at the city's Arboretum on Sunday.
Participants will be instructed to hug a stranger for 15 minutes
before embarking on a group hug accompanied by music from composer
JS Bach.
The brothers said it would be the first mass-hugging event staged
in Britain.
Hugging cluster
Gao Zhen and Gao Qiang from Beijing first took their unusual art
form, The Utopia of Hugging, to the stage in the Shangdong Province
of China in September 2000.
They invited 150 volunteers, previously strangers to each other,
to choose one person at random to hug, which they then did
simultaneously with hundreds of other couples.
The group then all joined together to form a giant hugging
cluster.
Gao Zhen said: "Since then, we personally have hugged hundreds of
strangers, and organised group hugs amongst strangers in different
public locations and in different ways all across China."
They then decided to set up their World Hug Day via the internet
and invited people across the world to post their public hugging
photographs.
The brothers said they were inspired to start the exhibition
because of the lack of hugging in their native country.
The Nottingham show will be accompanied by an international
photographic exhibition of the brothers' performances so far.
The next stop for the global tour is Marseille on 9 June.
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Hugging a stranger 
