Meet our 2024 medal-winning graduates

Christina Yuen Zi Chung
Graduate Medalist in Social Sciences

PhD, Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies

Christina Yuen Zi Chung is interested in how art intersects with culture and politics. Her thesis explores the integral and intertwined roles of gender and decoloniality reflected in contemporary Hong Kong art, which illuminates the cultural, political and economic negotiations between Hong Kong, Britain and the People’s Republic of China. Her work examines how the history, materiality and practice of art-making are integral to the construction of the territory’s future.

“Christina’s thesis is groundbreaking and beautifully written,” says Sasha Su-Ling Welland, chair of Chung’s thesis committee and professor and chair of the Department of Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies (GWSS). “Her scholarship…is shaping the nascent field of Hong Kong studies and reshaping the practice of curatorial work.”

Welland also praises Chung’s teaching, noting that Chung received the department’s Excellence in Teaching Award. “I still hear rave reviews from students who say (a course taught by Chung) was their favorite GWSS course,” Welland says.

Off campus, Chung worked with curators at the Seattle Asian Art Museum on a major overhaul of the museum’s permanent collection, and she brought her writing and curating skills to a series of art and scholarly projects on Hong Kong and its diaspora. A committed volunteer and advocate for linguistic justice, she has served as a Cantonese and Mandarin interpreter for the Chinese Information and Services Center as well as the Seattle Asian Counseling and Referral Service.

“I realized what a rare privilege it is to work with and learn from Christina,” says Welland. “She is theoretically adept, rigorous yet generous in her support of peers and undergraduates, and remarkably clear-sighted as she charts a scholarly trajectory that combines her many talents and skills as a researcher, teacher, public-facing scholar, and curator.”