Christine Wong Yap with students from Edwin and Anita Lee Newcomer Elementary
What I Love & Miss, 2022
Series of 20 portraits with calligraphy: social practice, drawings, inkjet prints
Courtesy of the artist

This work is on loan for the exhibition, Living Here, at the Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art, June 20 - December 20, 2025

What is a place that you miss and why? What’s a place that you love and why? Draw your own self-portrait and write about a place using this handout by Christine Wong Yap, the artist who incorporated children’s self-portraits in the drawings on the opposite wall.

“I like to think that asking people to respond to questions about their interior life creates much-needed space for self-reflection,” Christine Wong Yap told the Othering & Belonging Institute in 2019. What I Love and Miss was originally part of her Recognitions/ 认 • 知, a project aimed at articulating feelings of belonging in children who had recently migrated to the United States. Her collaborators were students from a one-year scholastic program in San Francisco Chinatown. For the past two decades, Yap has been shaping her artistic practice around optimism and happiness, drawing on the work of scholars such as Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi whose studies in positive psychology counterbalance the more common psychological focus on recovering from trauma. Yap likens this to preventative medicine, pointing out that it's beneficial to maintain good health, and less beneficial to allow negative symptoms to accrue before treating them. She worries that people tend to dismiss happiness as an unserious area of research, seeing it as something that can be simply felt and understood rather than a multifaceted process that can be investigated. The interactive component of What I Love and Miss invites us to gain insights into our feelings about belonging in a safe and constructive way.