Christine Wong Yap with Encore Community Services, How I Keep Looking Up (installed in Times Square, NYC), 2021, social practice, flags, flagpoles, signs, dimensions variable. Photo: Mike Vitelli for Times Square Arts.
About the alumni
Christine Wong Yap (she/they) holds a BFA and MFA from the California College of the Arts. Her work has been exhibited by Times Square Arts (NYC), the John Michael Kohler Arts Center (Sheboygan, WI), the Queens Museum of Art (Queens, NY), Bronx Museum of Art (Bronx), Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco), Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art (San Francisco), and Centre for Chinese Contemporary Art (Manchester U.K.), as well as in Los Angeles; Portland, OR; Manila; and Poland. Recently, her work was featured in a billboard and poster campaign by Avant Arte in collaboration with For Freedoms in London U.K.
An honoree of the 2020 YBCA 100, she has been awarded grants from the Queens Council on the Arts, the Jerome Foundation, and the Center for Cultural Innovation. She has served as a visiting artist at Ox-Bow School of Art (Saugatuck, MI) and the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
Currently, she is a Kala Art Institute Print Public municipal artist-in-residence with the City of Berkeley’s Health, Housing & Community Service. This past spring and summer, she was a public artist-in-residence at Times Square Arts. She has participated in over a dozen artist residencies and studio programs, including the Centre for Chinese Contemporary Art (Manchester U.K.), the Headlands Center for the Arts (Sausalito, CA), Woodstock Byrdcliffe (Woodstock, NY), Tides Institute and Museum of Art (Eastport, ME), Montalvo Arts Center (Saratoga, CA), Harvester Arts (Wichita, KS), c3:initiative (Portland, OR), Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (Governor’s Island, NY & Lower Manhattan, NY), Kala Art Institute (Berkeley, CA), Center for Book Arts (NYC), Sanitary Tortilla Factory (Albuquerque, NM), Little Paper Planes (San Francisco, CA), and the Othering & Belonging Institute (formerly the Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society) at U.C. Berkeley.
Reviews of her work have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, and Art Practical. Her work has also appeared on WCBS-TV, in print in the Oakland Tribune, the East Bay Express, and Sing Tao Daily, and on the websites of Artforum, CNN, The Guardian (UK), KQED Arts, New York Magazine, New Yorker Magazine, Oprah, SFMOMA’s Open Space blog, and White Hot Magazine. She has contributed to books published by Montez Press, INCA Press, Workman Publishing, New Press, Routledge, and New York University Press.
Born in California, she was a longtime resident of the San Francisco Bay Area. She lived in New York City for 10 years, and relocated back to the Bay Area this year.
Learn more about Christine’s art practice at https://christinewongyap.com