I have always been attentive to hands. Not merely their function, but their form. The way they vary from person to person, slender or thick, long-fingered or compact, youthful or worn. I notice how skin changes over time, how it thins and creases, how scars interrupt its surface, how folds and lines accumulate like annotations written slowly by living. Hands, more than faces, seem to tell the truth. They record what a life has asked of a body. In this way, hands become biographical documents, bearing witness to time, labor, affection, and loss.
This is what draws me so powerfully to Hands (2017) by He Lihuai. The painting offers almost nothing in the conventional sense: no face, no setting, no narrative arc. And yet it offers everything. In the interlaced hands, rendered with careful restraint, I encounter a life without being told its story. The work trusts the viewer to recognize meaning without instruction. It is an ethics of attention rather than explanation.
My own memories confirm this trust. I remember sitting with someone over coffee, our hands brushing by accident, then touching again deliberately. The sensation was electric. When our hands finally held one another, the moment felt complete in itself. When they looked at me and said they'd always wondered how my hands might feel, it was an instance of pure presence. Touch preceded interpretation. Long before words could clarify intention, the hands had already spoken.
I remember walking the halls of high school hand in hand with my sweetheart. It was a public gesture, unmistakably so. To hold hands in that space was to claim connection openly, to allow oneself to be seen. In retrospect, I understand it not simply as affection, but as courage. Hands, when joined, declare relationship in a way that language often hesitates to do.
I also remember the opposite. I remember being pushed away by hands that no longer wanted connection. The rejection arrived through the body before it was articulated through speech. In that moment, the withdrawal of touch clarified what words would later confirm. Hands can end relationships as decisively as they begin them.
These memories resonate with what psychology has long suggested: touch is foundational to human experience. Developmental research demonstrates that physical contact precedes language as the primary medium through which safety, belonging, and regulation are learned. Donald Winnicott’s concept of “holding” captures this power precisely. It is not merely the act of being physically held, but the broader psychological containment that allows a person to exist securely in relation to others. That early bodily knowledge never fully disappears. Even in adulthood, we continue to seek reassurance, recognition, and connection through the hands.
I remember the hands that taught me. My mother’s hands turning the pages of a book as she read aloud, steady and unhurried. The hands of teachers, fingertips whitened with chalk dust, shaping ideas line by line on blackboards. These hands did not simply convey information; they modeled patience, care, and presence. Learning, I realize now, was always embodied before it was intellectual.
I remember holding my grandmother’s hand as she slipped away from this life one breath at a time. Her hands were cold. So thin. No longer the hands that had rolled out hundreds of cookies, hands that once radiated the warmth of hearth and home to family and strangers alike. In that final moment, her hands no longer produced or served, yet they retained their meaning. Holding them became an act of witness, an acknowledgment that relationship persists even as function fails.
I remember my father’s hands, bloodied from work, and his impatient insistence that “the job’s not done until I’m bleeding.” It was not a philosophy so much as a habit, but it revealed something essential about him. His hands bore the cost of effort, the friction of a life lived in contact with resistance. They told a story of endurance without sentimentality.
And then there are my own hands. They carry scars: a cut across my palm, faded lines where my knife would open small wounds too big for my heart to hold, even smaller marks whose origins I no longer remember. They are unremarkable, yet entirely specific. They have held others and been pushed away. They have worked, taught, restrained, comforted, and failed. In them, I see the gradual accumulation of my own life.
Philosophically, this attention to hands aligns with Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s insistence that the body is not an object we possess, but the primary means through which we exist in the world. My hands are not instruments separate from my self; they are how my intentions enter the world. Through them, I enact care or harm, openness or withdrawal. They reveal my values before I articulate them.
This is why the hands in He Lihuai’s painting feel so honest. They are neither open in invitation nor clenched in rage. They rest in suspension. They are capable of both tenderness and violence, yet choosing neither in this moment. That ambiguity feels deeply human. Most of life is lived there, between reaching out and pulling back, between connection and self-protection.
Hands, I am coming to understand, do much of the moral work of being human. An open hand extended in peace signals trust and restraint. A clenched fist announces threat and withdrawal. The difference between the two is minimal in motion but immense in meaning. In this sense, ethical life is often enacted not through grand decisions, but through small physical gestures. Enacted through how, when, and whether we choose to touch.
Hands shows so little, yet it activates so much. It reminds me that our lives are written not only in words or beliefs, but in skin, scars, and gestures. To attend to hands, both others’ and my own, is to attend to the quiet, cumulative ways we relate to the world and to one another. In the end, being human is not an abstract condition. It is something we do, again and again, through the simple, consequential act of reaching out or pushing away. Of holding tight or letting go.