Hugging is such an affectionate thing. It is powerful and sacred. It is loving, caring, protective and protecting, intimate, and emotional— all packs inside a simple action. There is nothing that signifies intimacy better than a hug.
People say “a warm hug” because a hug is supposed to be warm— the warmth from two people, or more, whatever. But what if both huggers are cold? Where will that warmth come from? (Nowhere) Whether emotionally or physically, the lack of warmth, how will that affect the act? Is it a rare cold hug, or is it rare at all?
The door hinge is strangely anthropomorphic in a literal sense. The vertical standing figure, the two panels flapping back and forth— they instinctively remind one of an embrace, but not that human of an embrace. The steel is cold. Because of the properties of the material, at the very core and on the very surface, the door hinge is dead, inanimate, and emotionless. The white paint further amplifies that deadness—a forever blank, white, empty, null, meaningless,… coat.
On the surface…
Said above, “There’s nothing that signifies intimacy better than a hug.” Even if the intimacy isn’t healthy, I feel the same sentence still applies.
A hug, even cold, needs two parties. So, naturally, there is one couple of door hinges. It is a hug between two dead people, connected— or rather bounded— by tragedies. It is a toxic relationship between two people who are not necessarily in love or anything close to that nature but rather in pain—together. They are dependent on each other.
I read something along the line of this once, “Every tragedy I faced is like needle and thread sewing pieces of me together.” In a sense, the idea behind it is similar to something I explored before, “Life is work of origami, begins as an untouched piece of paper. Experiences, memories, successes, and failures fold and unfold, shape and unshape it into whatever form it is in the end.”
The needle and thread stuck in my mind more because it is almost more violent. The act of chaining separate pieces together, piercing through oneself, some sort of permanent attachment to the tragedies—they are more graphic and painful. The idea seems more like life. You gather pieces of yourself from what you go through.
The main point is that the tragedies are represented by the black thread. One single thread, continuous, because that is how I see it. A tragedy has no end. It simply fades away or morphs itself into another tragedy. It disguises its disappearance to make you feel free from it, and when you realize the disguise and want to be freed, you must untangle 20 years’ worth of cluster of a single thread.
Putting this thread in the context of the hug, I wanted to refer to the rope of tragedies that bound the two individuals. The tragedies are shared and interconnected. Your pain is my pain, and mine is yours too. They intoxicate each other with this back-and-forth interaction, going on for eternity—that’s why the needle is present. The pain sews them together. You become a part of me, and I am one of yours and we stand together as one.

If one wants to leave? It is possible just like all things, but that black thread will be clingy and difficult to resolve. This is a topic I eventually want to touch.
Lastly, I think black is just the universal color for bad things already. There is no reason to demonize it more.
And in the core…
Steel is cold. They are still dead. One of them, at least. They stand there in place because they have to be there. Literally, since I put them there and they can’t move, but also because they have nowhere to go (as far as now, I don’t have any hinge-less door).
BUT,
Can you hug yourself? Yes.
Skipping the clinging, one hinge stays back after the other got out—unburdened or not? Let’s not take that into account because we won’t know until we see the other hinge which we can’t now.
It stands there on its own. The continuous thread is now cut up, broken from the struggles of the other hinge leaving. Intentionally or not, that helped this hinge in finding its own freedom.

In the end, representation is just representation. I can try to put meaning to the sculpture all I want, but at the core, they are just dead objects. The door hinges hugging each other is not a warm hug because they are ultimately cold pieces of steel. Does that mean I can’t represent love (or something like that? Affection?) with them? Going by that same logic, can I really represent love with anything nonliving? Since everything is dead.

Some other forms that weren’t mentioned above:

Description: door hinge with threads sandwiched between the panels

Description: two door hinge