Earlier this week I had the pleasure of talking with the artist Christine Wong Yap on the subject of positive psychology, how optimism (and pessimism in turn) have become a framework for her artistic practice, and the current exhibition Happiness Is… at Montalvo Arts Center. Christine works across a range of media, including sculpture, installations, and works on paper, to create works that have the potential to elicit happiness, while investigating the science behind and complexity of such a pursuit.
Me: You create pieces that explore states of optimism and pessimism. What led you to explore psychology as basis, or framework, for your artistic practice?
Christine Wong Yap: I've always been interested in psychology, though my earlier work focused on the social aspects of it—public space, consumerism, and so on. Then I took grad school (2005-7) as an opportunity to re-invent my practice from the ground up. At the time, that meant making work that embodied the anxiety and shittiness of mundane life. It was very pessimistic, and about a year later, I decided to start making work about optimism. Even then, the work became very much about my ambivalence between optimism and pessimism, how each can be necessary, or how objects can be mirrors that reflect viewer's own perspectives.
Can you talk a little about the current 'Happiness' show at Montalvo? I understand that its part of a series of shows titled Flourish, about how artists explore subjects of wellbeing.
Happiness Is... is a group exhibition curated by Donna Conwell, featuring almost all new work by myself, and fellow California College of the Arts alum Leah Rosenberg and Susan O'Malley.
Happiness is... at Montalvo Arts Center
Over the course of several months, we collaborated to create the exhibition. Since I live in New York, it was crucial that I was in residence at Montalvo's beautiful Lucas Artists Program residency, so that Susan, Leah, Donna and I could work together in person and in the space. We talked a lot about color and stripes, and how colors can inspire delight, and our colors both consciously and unconsciously influenced each other. We also thought about how pleasure overlaps with happiness, but pleasure can be marked by time and signify loss or deflation, and how pleasure can be simple while happiness can be complex.
The show features sculptures, installations, light works, drawings, and site-specific participatory projects, and is on view through May 31.
With Joe’s Daughter, I’ve become interested in ideas of participation, the handmade, everyday materials, and of personal expressions of positive emotion, each of which comes together in your work in pieces such as Irrational Exuberance Flags. My concern for these subjects comes from ideas of connectedness, but I wonder what draws you to them.
I love how mundane materials can inspire or convey "irrational" expectations, emotions or experiences. I had a realization that if I associate pessimism with the everyday and the mundane, and optimism with the transcendent and rare, I was giving much more weight to pessimism by accepting that it is ubiquitous. I wondered, what would happen if optimism and the positive was everyday, was ubiquitous?
Christine Wong Yap, Irrational Exuberance Flags, 2013
So I started working with discount store materials, playing with very simple transformations, so that the colors and materials could be everyday as well as exuberant. I was thinking a lot about class, and how everyone loves to decorate, and how I would not want to draw distinctions between objects that give people joy or a sense of self or of home based on how they're made or manufactured.
I love to use simple techniques, so that the result is less about me as an artist, but more about what viewers bring to the experience of interacting with the object. With the flags, I also enjoy the feeling that I'm working in an old domestic tradition—that flags are something that people designed, made, and displayed for themselves.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, my favorite positive psychologist, writes about "symbolic ecologies" in the home, which remind you of who you are, your accomplishments, and goals. While I used to disdain materialism wholesale, I now think about how cherished objects can inspire sentiment and even personal growth, and am very interested in thinking more about things, what they say, and what they say about us.
Christine Wong Yap, Give Thanks, 2011
I was particularly drawn to the pieces that encourage, or engage, with the act of making oneself or someone else, happy: Give Thanks or The Great Balloon Giveaway. How have you approached gesturing happiness, and the issue of connectivity that this can imply?
People who feel connected to others also feel happier themselves. Giving feels good. Expressing gratitude is a method for increasing subjective wellbeing.
In a way, these projects are excuses to have people enact these exercises and well-being strategies. For example, Give Thanks takes the gratitude journal exercise and makes it physical, collective, and public. In The Great Balloon Giveaway, I was also thinking about cognitive linguistics and embodied experience—looking up, giving balloons to strangers, seeing color circulate Lake Merritt—and how this activity might subtly shift experience towards the positive.
Trust or skepticism are manifested anytime a viewer encounters an object, or one person with another.
I’d like to talk about the Ribbon pieces: of how aphorisms can be used to will states of positive mental wellbeing. There’s a joy within your work, and a conceptual rigour and approach, but without that cynicism that could enter into it, and that affirmations also can be charged with. Although there are those words ‘Irrational’ and ‘earnest’ in some of your titling. What is your position on the more satirical, or more derided, aspects of the subject of happiness?
Christine Wong Yap, Ribbon Texts, 2011-12
It is very easy to ridicule the search for happiness. It doesn't help that people are often mistaken about what they think will make them happy, as Sonja Lyubomirsky explains. It is also unfortunate that people's definitions of happiness vary so widely—a common understanding is pleasure, an experience that comes to you from outside stimulus, something that cannot be cultivated. Lasting happiness is much bigger than fleeting pleasures. Further, positive psychology is an empirical field that seeks to describe, not proscribe, what makes people happy, and it's regrettable when it is mistaken for pop psychology, positive thinking, or self-help.
One aspect that I’m curious about is this idea of the language in this field–how do you find people react to ideas of, and the language for, happiness and positive psychology. Are these subjects taken ‘seriously’ within the context of the art world. How do you as an artist take on that language and its connotations?
Johanna Drucker has written about the academy's outdated association between criticality and oppositionality. I have certainly been surprised when contemporary art audiences assume that my works are skeptical or intended to ridicule self-help. It's interesting how sincerity can arouse suspicion. What kind of habit is skepticism of sentiment?
When people assume that happiness is just pleasure, they think it's frivolous and simple-minded. But one of the goals of positive psychology is to study and reveal the complexity of happiness. The Positive Signs series of drawings is an attempt to share such research and rigor.
Christine Wong Yap, Positive Signs: United Theories, 2012
How has your position on happiness shifted? Or how is it shifting?
For a time, I wasn't sure how much more I could mine this terrain. But when I attended the International Positive Psychological Association's conference in 2011 with the support of the Jerome Foundation, I realized that positive psychology is a growing field. The research on happiness will continue to develop and change. Moreover, the intersection of positive psychology and the arts is nascent. There is vast potential. I may expand my practice to other, related themes, or yet dive deeper into more specific facets.