Christine Wong Yap

Christine Wong Yap is a visual artist and social practitioner working in community engagement, drawing, printmaking, publishing, and public art to explore well-being, belonging, and resilience. She has developed participatory research and public art projects with Times Square Arts, the Wellcome Trust, For Freedoms, the Othering and Belonging Institute, and more. At the start of 2023, she launched two solo exhibitions in San Francisco and led the first contemporary art project in the 172-year history of the San Francisco Chinese New Year Parade. Later this year she will publish a set of 12 zines in an international exchange between New York, Berlin, Tokyo, and Bangalore. After a decade of living in New York City, she lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Christine Wong Yap

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. It took place in May 2023.

GM: Your practice is multidisciplinary and features social practice, drawing, printmaking, and publishing. What was your path to becoming an artist and utilizing these mediums?

CWY: I’ve always loved making art and couldn’t wait to leave my public high school to make art my primary focus. Thankfully I ended up at the California College of Arts, and in my freshman year a teacher had us try relief printmaking, and I was hooked I liked the mark-making, low-tech techniques, and democratic potential of woodcut printmaking. Now when I make prints it’s usually via letterpress printing, but I also see the zines and books that I publish to be in the same spirit of access, dissemination, and decentralization. I came to social practice a bit circuitously; in my 20s, I was a community-based artist and youth educator. In grad school at CCA, I realized that I don’t want to make art about me, so I made installation art for a bit, which gave way towards participatory projects. I didn’t study social practice, but one of my advisors was the late social practitioner, Ted Purves. Ted’s influence, and my experiences working with communities, shows up in my social practice work now. I’m happy that as an artist today, I can draw upon many skills, values, and experiences I gained from different day jobs as an art handler, artist assistant, community-based artist, graphic designer, etc.

GM: Many of your projects emphasize participatory methods in order to create site-specific public artworks. Do you believe that society is receptive to art in the public sphere, or are they still drawn to the institution?

CWY: Both. Society is receptive to art in the public sphere, but a lot of people tend to like what they like. This can lean towards familiar forms of visual communication, which are consumed in established ways. It can be a bit more work to explain a community-engaged, social practice process, and to ask the public to engage art in a different way. The institution is a draw. I remember seeing a class from an elementary school visit a museum, and I noticed that one student wore a suit. On one hand, it was so sweet that the kid’s family thought a museum visit was a special occasion. On the other hand, I believe museums are public resources which ought to be freely accessible, and everyone should feel welcome to visit them anytime – not just on special occasions organized by schools. Isn’t it strange to think that art or culture aren’t native to our public spaces? I’ve been working in San Francisco Chinatown and Manilatown, and it’s a really vibrant neighborhood where art and especially culture exist in public spaces. Partly because of urban density, and partly because organizations like the Chinese Culture Center of San Francisco make it their mission to program beyond the walls of the gallery. Just walking down the street, you can encounter a lion dance rehearsal, hear various dialects, try cultural foods, see public art activations, and so on. Maybe we ought to be less receptive to the amount of public spaces given over to producing and consuming commodities, and normalize public spaces that support us in being who we are and sharing that with other people.