HOLDING: CHRISTINE WONG YAP
Photograph of Artist-in-Resident, Christine Wong Yap. Photo by Andria Lo, Courtesy of Avant Arte.
March 22 – april 29, 2023
CHRISTINE WONG YAP (she/they) is a visual artist and social practitioner working in community engagement, drawing, printmaking, publishing, and public art to explore psychological well-being, belonging, and resilience. She has developed participatory research and public art projects in partnership with Times Square Arts, the Wellcome Trust, For Freedoms, the Othering and Belonging Institute at UC Berkeley, Chinese Culture Center of San Francisco, the Library Foundation of Los Angeles, and more. She lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area, after a decade of living in New York City.
In her residency at Berkeley Art Center, visual artist and social practitioner Christine Wong Yap will activate local and international engagements to support emotional wellbeing.
Informed by positive psychology and participatory research, Christine will lead hands-on workshops to co-create Self-Care Card Decks. Self-care can play an important role in ameliorating stress and managing negative emotions. The workshops will be offered in partnership with the historic UC Berkeley Multicultural Community Center both on campus and to the general public at Berkeley Art Center.
In addition, Christine will launch a quartet of zines featuring community-generated activities to increase feelings of belonging or spark joy. The hand-lettered activities were gathered in design workshops led by Christine in New York City, Berlin, Tokyo, and Bengaluru, India in 2022 in her role as artist-in-residence at large with Mindscapes, the Wellcome Trust’s international cultural program about mental health. The zines will be available in English, Japanese, and German and disseminated to contributors and collaborators in all four countries, as well as public libraries. Collectively, the zines form a multilingual knowledge bank of homegrown activities on belonging and mental health.
In her residency, Christine will activate the BAC gallery as a site of workshops and zine production. She’ll display zine process ephemera, as well as another project affiliated with Mindscapes: seven large textile banners which celebrate library-affiliated spaces of belonging, commissioned by the Los Angeles Library Foundation and Los Angeles Public Library.
Join us during our series of public events.
public programs:
Los Angeles Public Library Zine Club
Monday, April 3, 4–5:30 pm | Online
Christine will be a featured guest zinester and share her practice as a zine maker.
Artist’s Talk & Zine Launch Party
Saturday, April 8, 2–5 pm | Berkeley Art Center
Artist’s Talk from 2–3, followed by a reception from 3–5.
Celebrate this year-long project with a slide show and conversation. Refreshments will be served.
Self-Care Card Deck Workshop
Thursday, April 13 from 6–7PM | Berkeley Art Center
A participatory, hands-on workshop modeled after fast-paced athletic circuit training. We will brainstorm how we already practice self-awareness, self-compassion, self-acceptance, and self-love. Then we’ll draw and hand-letter a card deck of these practices. Ages 12 and up.
Arathi H K drawing in a workshop hosted by the Museum of Arts and Photography in Bengaluru, India, in 2022. Image courtesy of the artist.
Christine Wong Yap and Contributors, Self-Care Card Deck, developed during the Social Justice Teach-In at CalPoly San Luis Obispo in 2022. Image courtesy of the artist.
Workshop participants created how-to activity sheets to support belonging in a community garden in Kreuzberg, Berlin, Germany in 2022. Image courtesy of the artist.
Exhibition documentation by Carla Hernandez Ramirez
