Christine Wong Yap

GM: You’ve opened two solo social practice exhibitions this year, Recognitions / 认 • 知 at CCA’s Campus Gallery and How Do I Keep Looking Up / Como Sigo Mirando Hacia Arriba / 仰望 at the Chinese Cultural Center of San Francisco Both projects highlighted migration and cartography – why was this important to you, and what did both projects mean to you?

CWY: I’m the daughter of immigrants whose migrations spanned China, Vietnam, Hong Kong, and the Dominican Republic. It’s easy for people to look at me and assume that me or my parents had a straightforward, middle-class migration from China, which disregards my family’s lived experiences of war, the threat of persecution during the Cultural Revolution, food insecurity, sacrifices, uncertainty, persistence, resilience, survival, and hard-won accomplishments, all of which contribute to intergenerational legacies that shape my identity and mindset. I’ve been exploring belonging for a few years, and working in hyper-local contexts allows me to gather more specific insights. San Francisco is one of the most expensive places to live in the U.S., and national publications’ “doom loop” narratives about this city typically center the concerns of the hyper-privileged rich and criminalize and other the hyper-vulnerable poor, while ignoring the working-class, immigrant residents who fight everyday to call this city home. I want to celebrate the people, cultures, and neighborhoods that give San Francisco vibrancy, diversity, texture, and humanity. These projects welcome newcomer youth and highlight working class women’s lives and resilience. They widen my world by building bridges that span local neighborhoods and countries of origin. There’s so much media attention on corporations that leave the city, and not nearly enough about the heartbreak caused by policies that separate families through immigration, displacement, and gentrification.

GM: You also recently completed a month-long residency at the Berkeley Art Center, Holding, which activated the gallery space with self-care workshops and zine production. What was the inspiration for this project and how did you construct it?

CWY: I was inspired to create an international zine exchange and grassroots knowledge bank on belonging and mental health. The zine is called Kindling: Activities to Spark Joy and Belonging Gathered from Around the World, and it resulted from a social practice residency with Mindscapes, the Wellcome Trust’s cultural initiative exploring mental health To gather the content, I co-led 11 workshops in the four Mindscapes cities – New York City, Berlin, Tokyo, and Bengaluru, India – in 2022. Nearly 100 participants hand-drew 85 contributions; there are four zines, one for each city, and the set totals over 200 pages. It’s now available in English, and the German and Japanese translations are forthcoming The Self-Care Card Deck project is inspired by my interest in positive psychology, and my belief that we already know what we need to do to take care of ourselves, but it’s hard to practice it. It can be beneficial to have the time to reflect on self-care and be spurred to think more deeply about the ways we care for ourselves [That can be] through getting to know ourselves better, practicing self-acceptance or self-compassion, cultivating joy and wellbeing, and so on. (Continued)

Christine Wong Yap