Blue Hockey: Exploring Bodies and Relationships Through Uncertainty

When I paint with a hockey stick, the distance between my hand and the surface changes. A familiar movement becomes unfamiliar. The length of the stick affects my reach, the pressure of each mark, and how much control I have over what appears.

My body has to negotiate with the tool.

This negotiation connects with a question that runs through my Blue Hockey series: how can I give form to my thoughts about individuals, bodies, and relationships when those relationships are always changing?

On the ice, each player occupies a space that is continually reshaped by others. A body moves forward because another body approaches. A stick extends a player’s reach. A collision briefly brings separate people into a shared structure. Balance depends on forces that no individual can fully control.

I find these moments compelling. Within a collision, it can become difficult to distinguish one body from another. Limbs, equipment, intentions, and directions overlap. Each person remains an individual, yet the shape of the moment belongs to everyone involved.

In my paintings, uncertain forms allow me to stay with this experience. A figure may emerge from a stain, merge with another figure, or become difficult to locate. The viewer can sense pressure and movement before identifying precisely what is happening. I am interested in that interval between recognition and uncertainty.

My materials also participate in this process.

In cyanotype and Chinese ink on xuan paper, light, water, absorption, and drying influence the image. I make decisions, but the surface retains events that I cannot entirely predict. An edge spreads. A blue area changes in intensity. A trace remains after washing. These changes become part of the work’s memory.

With acrylic paint, colour and palette-knife marks give movement a different physical presence. Painting with a hockey stick introduces another relationship: an object made for the game becomes a tool for thinking about it. Its resistance asks me to adjust my gestures and respond to what happens on the surface.

Across these processes, uncertainty gives me something to work with. An unexpected mark can suggest a relationship I had not yet seen. I decide whether to develop it, interrupt it, or leave it unresolved. The painting grows through this exchange between intention and response.

Living in Prince Edward Island, I encounter hockey through family and community life. It gives these questions a familiar setting, while opening onto experiences that extend beyond the rink: gathering, belonging, protecting a space, depending on others, and carrying pressure alone.

Two works from Blue Hockey—The Blue Hockey Team and Blue Hockey: The Collision—were acquired by the Prince Edward Island Art Bank in 2026. The series continues to develop through different materials and ways of making.

What holds it together is an ongoing inquiry: how does an individual take shape among others, and how can a painting preserve a relationship that exists only for a moment?

For now, I continue through marks, materials, and movements whose outcomes remain partly open.

Liu,Xin (Leo Liu) · Contemporary Artist · PEI, Canada