A site-specific commission, Christine Sun Kim’s Gappp Years (2025) responds to themes central to YDP’s ethos, including the ideas of home, movement, and dialogue, as well as the relationship between the self and cultural identities.
Installed across the glass façade of a two-storey link building that overlooks an internal courtyard, the mural sits at the meeting point between YDP’s original Georgian architecture, twentieth-century additions, and recent reconstruction. It bridges the spaces dedicated to exhibitions, residencies, and events.
Drawing upon recurring motifs in Kim’s practice, the playfulness of the mural echoes YDP’s character as an experimental and lively hub for art. Glazing panels are joined by arched lines that evoke a musical tie, whose function is to link notes of the same pitch to create a single sustained note with extended duration. Sometimes stretching long and steady through three panels, sometimes bouncing from letter to letter at uneven intervals, the lines that reach across gaps represent the multiple, shifting identities one collects and negotiates with while in search of self-understanding. For Kim, the letter ‘p’ in the mural holds the double meaning of piano (soft musical dynamic) and ‘past’. Self and family, past and present remain connected, despite the complicated spatial-temporal gaps and multiplicity of identities often associated with diasporic experiences.