Christine Wong Yap

Christine Wong Yap weaves visual art with social practice, approaching her work as a tool to foster community and explore themes of wellbeing and belonging. Her site-specific works - often facilitated through community workshops and exhibited in ‘non-art’ public spaces - combine text with comics, diagrammatic drawing and textile elements. In zines and publications, she collects stories from across the globe to create a symbolic document for collective memory. Always invested in the stories that inform her artworks, she says: “Why not make the backstory - the usually-unseen where, who and how - as visible and present as the what?” Through poetic records of human experience realised in multiple artistic forms, she demonstrates the ways in which communal creativity can contribute to both individual and societal resilience.

Yap creates work that incites introspection. In 2020 the artist-run collective For Freedoms commissioned her to create a public monument in response to the 2020 US election. Yap’s billboard posed a question central to her practice: How do you keep your heart open? Realised as a pencil drawing with the telltale marks of a preparatory sketch, the work retains a sense of being in progress, and in doing so, frames a notion of self-reflection: a continual process that embraces imperfections and vulnerability. With community and care running throughout her practice, Yap works towards a universal homecoming for all who encounter her art.