A Chinese American woman in her 40s with shoulder length black hair and bangs wears a gold dress in front of a marble wall. She has a tattoo of a bunny beneath her collarbone.

Christine Wong Yap

Daly City, CA

Christine Wong Yap is a visual artist and social practitioner who works in community engagement, drawing, printmaking, publishing, textiles, and public art. Through her hyperlocal participatory research projects, she gathers and amplifies grassroots perspectives on belonging, resilience, and mental well being. From 2023–2024, she served as Neighborhood Visiting Artist at Stanford University. In 2023, Christine led the first contemporary art project in the 150+ year history of the San Francisco Chinese New Year parade. The companion solo exhibition was seen by over 20,000 visitors. In 2022, she served as the Creative Citizenship Fellow at the California College of the Arts with support from the NEA, which also culminated in a solo exhibition.

She has developed projects with the Chinese Culture Center of San Francisco, For Freedoms, the Library Foundation of Los Angeles, the Othering and Belonging Institute at UC Berkeley, and Times Square Arts. She has participated in 20 artist residencies, studio programs, and fellowships. Her work has been recognized and supported by the Center for Cultural Innovation, Jerome Foundation, Kenneth Rainin Foundation, Queens Council on the Arts, and YBCA. She is one of 12 “host-heroes of belonging” in Design for Belonging by Susie B. Wise (2022).

Holding a BFA and MFA in printmaking from the California College of the Arts, she lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area, after a decade of living in New York City.

Bay Windows / Ventanas en saliente / 窗花


Christine Wong Yap is a visual artist and social practitioner exploring belonging, resilience, and mental well being through lettering, printmaking, publishing, textiles, and public art.

Artist Bio

Bay Windows is a process-oriented, human-centered project reconvening a cohort of 16 Chinese and Latinx women who have limited access to art and limited English proficiency. Working with a team of interpreters, Christine Wong Yap will facilitate trilingual storytelling, design, and artmaking workshops in San Francisco Chinatown and the Mission District. The cohort will explore how migration has motivated them to address immigration, housing, labor, health, climate, and safety in their communities.

Guest culture bearers will lead demonstrations of jianzhi—Chinese cut paper folk art—and papel picado—Mexican paper punching (which emerged after Spanish colonizers banned Aztec bark paper and imported tissue paper from China). Drawing parallels between Puebla artisans’ ingenuity under cultural genocide and participants’ survival despite xenophobia, family separation, abuse, linguistic isolation, and economic precarity, Wong Yap will collaborate with participants to create paper cuts reflecting their narratives of transformation, agency, and solidarity.

Pending additional support and input, Wong Yap will interpret the small, fragile paper cuts into public artworks for display in Chinatown and the Mission District, which may include oversized illuminated lanterns, decentralized light boxes with trilingual maps, and/or banners carried by participants in a public procession, bookending a prior project in the Chinese New Year Parade.

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Award Year
2025
Status

In Progress