In this Episode of Art is Awesome, Host Emily Wilson spends time with born and raised SF artist Christine Wong Yap.
Welcome to Art is Awesome, the show where we talk with an artist or art worker with a connection to the San Francisco Bay Area.
Today, Emily chats with Christine Wong Yap, a visual artist working in printmaking, social practice, and community-based art.
Christine discusses her latest project "Bay Windows/Ventanas," a trilingual public art installation featuring lanterns created with Chinese-speaking women in Chinatown and Spanish-speaking women in the Mission District. The lanterns, displayed at five locations through March 11th, explore themes of mental health, belonging, and immigrant experiences through traditional paper-cutting techniques.
About Artist Christine Wong Yap:
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. Last year, she received a a Creative Power Award from the Walter & Elise Haas Foundation and Creative Capital Award. She has served as Neighborhood Visiting Artist at Stanford University (Stanford, CA) and Creative Citizenship Fellow at the California College of the Arts (San Francisco, CA). 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, Times Square Arts, and the Wellcome Trust, among others. She holds a BFA and MFA in printmaking from the California College of the Arts. She was born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she has lived since spending a decade in New York City from 2010 to 2021.
Visit Christine's Website: ChristineWongYap.com
Follow Christine on Instagram: @ChristineWongYap
For more about Christine's Bay Windows project and upcoming scavenger hunt CLICK HERE
To learn about The Creative Capital Award CLICK HERE
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About Podcast Host Emily Wilson:
Emily a writer in San Francisco, with work in outlets including Hyperallergic, Artforum, 48 Hills, the Daily Beast, California Magazine, Latino USA, and Women’s Media Center. She often writes about the arts. For years, she taught adults getting their high school diplomas at City College of San Francisco.
Follow Emily on Instagram: @PureEWil
Follow Art Is Awesome on Instagram: @ArtIsAwesome_Podcast
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CREDITS:
Art Is Awesome is Hosted, Created & Executive Produced by Emily Wilson.
Theme Music "Loopster" Courtesy of Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
The Podcast is Co-Produced, Developed & Edited by Charlene Goto of @GoToProductions.
For more info, visit Go-ToProductions.com
2026-0120 - AIA - EP063 - Christine Wong Yap
Host Emily Wilson: [00:00:00] Art is Awesome can now be heard on KSFP 1 0 2 0.5 FM every Friday at 9:00 AM and 7:00 PM Please follow the show and rate us wherever you get your podcast media. If you like what you hear from today's artist, you can find links and information about them in our show notes.
Artist Christine Wong Yap: I took a trip to Indonesia as a backpacker when I was 18 years old.
One thing I did was I drew every day, and I remember towards the end of my trip, which was probably like two or three weeks or something, I just felt like the fluidity of my hand and being able to have things come out in my drawing the way I envision them.
Host Emily Wilson: That's Christine Wong. Yap, the guest on this week's art is awesome.
I am your host, Emily Wilson. I'm a writer in San Francisco, often covering the arts, and I've been meeting such great people [00:01:00] that I created this biweekly podcast to highlight their work.
Christine Wong Yap has shown work at the Berkeley Art Center, the Chinese Culture Center of San Francisco, the Canner Art Center at Stanford, the Bronx Museum of Art, and the Queen's Museum of Art, as well as in Bangalore, India, Los Angeles, the Philippines, and Portland, Oregon. I first got to talk to Christine when she was working on a project with the Chinese Culture Center during COVID art, culture and belonging, and I was impressed by how genuine she was about using art to create a feeling of belonging and connection.
A couple of years ago, I talked with her again when she was working on a trilingual project, how I keep looking up with Spanish speaking women in the mission and China speaking. Ones in Chinatown. The woman created banners. And marched with them in San Francisco's Lunar New Year parade alongside [00:02:00] Lion Dancers, marching bands, and floats.
Christine wanted to work with the 15 women again and now thanks partly to a grant from Creative Capital and the Creative Power Award. She has done workshops with them to create lanterns, which are now in display at various spots in Chinatown and the Mission District. We met at Galleria dea, one of the places for her project Bay Windows.
Artist Christine Wong Yap: After writing many, many grants, I was able to engage them again with a series of six workshops. Some of them were at Kearny Street Workshop. Some of them were right here at Galleria de la Raza Studio 24 on 24th , and I was really interested in how both Chinese and Mezo American cultures have strong paper cutting traditions.
Host Emily Wilson: Christine got guest artists to teach and she did workshops to find out what social and political issues the women were interested in. [00:03:00]
Artist Christine Wong Yap: Based on that, I collaborated with them to create some designs to represent their narratives, and then the women turned those into paper cuts. They cut them out by hand, and then I turned those into lanterns, which is what you see here.
Host Emily Wilson: Christine described one hanging in the window.
Artist Christine Wong Yap: One of the lanterns here is by mouth and Juan, and both of these lanterns are actually about mental health. Mouth fins is, I had a photograph of her paper cut and then I mounted it onto printed on fabric, which is mounted onto wood, which has Chinese inspired motifs.
And the paper cut that you see is blue with two kind of heads that are kind of overlapping, kind of like a Venn diagram. And the person on the left has this stormy cloud in their mind, and then the person on the right has sun, but then the storm from the left person is kind of like coming over into crossing over into the sunny side, and it's about like how mental health affects everybody and how one person's [00:04:00] mental health kind of also impacts the community's health as well.
Host Emily Wilson: Christine was the first artist in residence at the Othering and Belonging Institute at uc, Berkeley. She got interested in the idea of belonging after a trip back to the Bay Area from New York to see her mom during Lunar New Year. Her mom was setting up altars when Christine looked at her phone.
Artist Christine Wong Yap: I saw all these protests erupting at airports around the country, including at SFO, and it was because it was like a Friday afternoon and Trump had handed down a ban that was effectively a Muslim ban and it was causing all sorts of chaos at the airports and a lot of uncertainty.
And I really thought about how the subtext of that is you don't belong here. You're an immigrant. Your belonging is conditional. And then I also found this little scrap of newspaper at my mom's house that she kept by her sewing table, and it was. The small town where my parents lived back in like 1980, ran an article that was [00:05:00] celebrating the naturalization ceremony where my parents became citizens, and I really thought like, what a contrast where that subtext is.
Host Emily Wilson: Christine has done about 20 residencies, including many here in the Bay Area. She says this works well with the kinds of things she makes, which are conceptual and community-based.
Artist Christine Wong Yap: I think my work largely resists being commodified, or if it is commodified, it's like a zine. It's not gonna be very lucrative for a commercial gallery with hundreds of dollars a square feet for me, like residencies have been a place. Where I found support and time and space to make art. 'cause for many years I was an art handler and just the grind of installing art, just having like this really intense physical work, being able to go away on a residency and have like this kind of intense round the clock residences offer continuity so you can go to sleep thinking about one thing and wake up and still continue to do that thing is so great.
Host Emily Wilson: [00:06:00] Christine got her BFA and MFA at California College of the Arts in San Francisco.
Artist Christine Wong Yap: I didn't have many choices, like I had to be an artist when I was a kid. I just loved being creative and drawing. And actually when I was in high school, because my parents didn't go to college, it was just a few art teachers who steered me in the right direction towards applying to California College with the arts.
So luckily they accepted me because I only applied to one college.
Host Emily Wilson: Christine studied printmaking, thinking she would do graphic design.
Artist Christine Wong Yap: Even though I did an impractical thing of deciding to be an artist, I also grew up in a way where my parents really emphasized being practical. Just as a kid growing up in the suburbs, I thought I would go into graphic design partly 'cause that's what I knew besides like airbrush posters at Tower Records, you know, just like album covers and magazines is what I was consuming.
I also had a hard time drawing. I had this mindset of an artist as a person who can draw, and I [00:07:00] was like trying to get around drawing and I, when I did linoleum cutting in my first year course and I was able to be very expressive without having to have spur realistic drawing skills. It was really cool.
So I went towards that and I really fell in love with woodcut. It's so expressive and there's such a long history of artists. From all around the world who've done it, and a lot of the work is very sociopolitical, which really spoke to me too.
Host Emily Wilson: Christine got two big grants recently. One of them the Creative Capital Award.
Artist Christine Wong Yap: That's been a long time dream of mine to apply for that and often I've been too intimidated to apply for it and I think I've been learning how to dream more ambitiously and, and part of it comes out of need because this previous project that I did with Chinese Culture Center, how I keep looking up, they weren't able to partner with me again for Bay Windows to the same extent.
Like I'm still working with them, but I had to do a lot more fundraising myself. For this project, and that's why it [00:08:00] took a couple years to launch Creative Capital. Stepping in with that huge grant really helped me make this project a reality. And then more recently I was awarded a Creative Power Award from the Walter and Elise Haas Fund, which is just amazing 'cause it's an, it's an unrestricted award.
So I am putting some of it towards this project, but I can also put it towards other things. Both those awards, any of the grants are basically allowing me to. Live my dream, which is to be a full-time artist.
Host Emily Wilson: There will be a scavenger hunt on Saturday, January 24th from 11 to two. At the five sites, you can collect clues and win prizes.
Artist Christine Wong Yap: Bay Windows Ventana will be up on view for three months. And as the primary public activation, we decided to do a scavenger hut. And it's just to get people to go out to see all these lanterns. So there's 15 different unique lanterns, and I wanted to display them in windows [00:09:00] that are a storefront and based in these immigrant neighborhoods of Chinatown.
And the Mission District, there's five different sites, and the scavenger hunt is to. A day when you can go to all the sites. There will be, the designers will be stationed there so you can interact with them if you can speak Chinese or Spanish, or if not, you can also collect a stamp.
Host Emily Wilson: At the end of each episode, I ask the guests three things to understand them a little better. They are, when did you know you were an artist? What's some work that's had an impact on you and what's the most creatively inspiring place in the Bay Area?
Artist Christine Wong Yap: I kind of struggled with drawing, and then there was this weird conflict of factors happening where I ended up going to Bali by myself. I, I took a trip to Indonesia as a backpacker when I was 18 years old, and one thing I did was [00:10:00] just, I drew every day. I brought this like huge 12 by 12 inch sketchbook and everyday I drew, and I remember towards the end of my trip, which was probably like two or three weeks or something, I just felt like the fluidity of my hand and being able to.
Have things come out in my drawing, the way I envision them in my head, and that really felt like a really great breakthrough.
In undergrad when I was doing so much relief, printmaking, I was looking at a lot of different artists like Kathe Kolletz and Elizabeth Catlett and Jose Guadalupe Posada. Now I realize sometimes people are like, how did you go from printmaking to social practice? And I'm like, I think they're actually quite related.
And I think it has to do with there's a spirit of decentralization, dissemination. They helped realize the potential, like a democratic potential. And I think that's encapsulated in the work of Jose Guadalupe Pasada, [00:11:00] the Mexican wood engraver, who is cool, like not just like what he made, but also how he made it and how he distributed it.
Because in printmaking, like a lot. Prints now that are limited edition sign in numbered, and then you destroy the plate. It kind of is like this European model about creating artificial scarce scarcity to drive up the price. But, um, Jose Guadalupe, ADA, he distributed things, um, much more cheaply. He made a lot of copies.
He didn't limit the number. So Jose would make these, his images appear above like poems or um, songs in these like, like flying sheets. And it was to help people with limited literacy skills, access to content, which I think is so, you know, a lot of his work was also anti elitist and making fun of the rich and the powerful.
So I love that. I also love that additional connection. To my project, which is really about language justice.[00:12:00]
I feel the need to shout out the places where I've done residency, so Kala Art Institute, Montalvo Arts Center, the Headland Center for the Arts, Berkeley Arts Center, and then places like California College of the Arts in Stanford. Where they've had me as a fellow. Those have been super fun and amazing. I think also actually a place that's been like very inspiring for me is the Exploratorium, especially their kind of like older exhibits about psychology and perception.
I'm especially thinking of certain things that require two people to activate. Sometimes you sit at like a, a bench facing two people will sit on stools facing each other, but there'll be a series of glass and mirror panels, which are like interspersed. And then you kind of line up your nose, you see your eyes, and then the, [00:13:00] you see their eyes with your nose or your mouth and things like that.
And we're, I just love how the Exploratorium cultivates play and curiosity and embodiedness and connection through those activities.
Host Emily Wilson: Thank you to our guest, Christine Wong Yap. Her project with Women in the Mission in Chinatown Bay. Windows is on display through March 11th. It's at axion Latino. The Brava Theater and Galleria de Laa on or near 24th Street in San Francisco, as well as 41 Ross and the Chinatown campus of City College on Saturday, January 24th.
There's a scavenger hunt from 11 to two. And thank you for listening to Art is Awesome. If you haven't subscribed to the show, please do. And if you liked what you heard, please leave a rating after [00:14:00] listening to help others find the show. Join us next time to hear Weaver Adrian Bush, whose show of water is at M Stark in Half Moon Bay.
Art Is Awesome is a biweekly podcast coming out every other Tuesday. It's created and hosted by me, Emily Wilson. It is produced and edited it. Charlene GoTo. Of go-to productions. It's carried on KSFP, LP 1 0 2 0.5 FM San Francisco on Fridays at 9:00 AM and 7:00 PM Our theme music is provided by Kevin McLeod with Incompetent Music.
Be sure and follow us on Instagram at Art is Awesome podcast or visit our website till next [00:15:00]time.