Location: San Francisco, CA
Medium: Social practice, printmaking, public art
Website: christinewongyap.com
Christine Wong Yap was born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. She received a BFA with High Distinction from California College of the Arts in 1998 and returned to CCA for an MFA in 2007. She spent the following decade based in New York City before returning permanently to the Bay Area in 2021. She has been a Visiting Neighborhood Artist at Stanford University, a Creative Citizenship Fellow at California College of the Arts, the inaugural Artist-in-Residence at UC Berkeley’s Othering & Belonging Institute, a Fellow at the Kala Art Institute, and an Affiliate Artist at the Headlands Center for the Arts. In 2025 she received both a Creative Capital Award and the inaugural Creative Power Award from the Walter & Elise Haas Foundation — a $100,000 unrestricted grant recognizing her sustained work on belonging and mental well-being. Her work is held in the collection of the Walker Art Center.
Wong Yap is a visual artist and social practitioner whose work draws on participatory research, positive psychology, and deep community collaboration. She builds projects over months or years alongside specific communities — often working-class immigrant women in San Francisco’s Chinatown and Mission District — gathering stories and translating them into hand-crafted objects: letterpress-printed certificates, screen-printed bandannas, textile banners, soft sculptures, lanterns, zines, and comics. Her output is frequently multilingual (English, Chinese, Spanish), designed for public space, and made to be touched and used rather than only viewed. Running through all of it is a sustained inquiry into belonging, resilience, and emotional flourishing — what positive psychology calls subjective well-being — which she treats as a subject as worthy of rigorous artistic attention as trauma or loss.
This entry was written by the Bay Area Artist Wiki project and is based on publicly available information.
Claim this page → to update your own profile.