Between 1992 and 1996, Yap served as a mentor with the Creative Arts Programme run by the Ministry of Education to help inspire students and nurture young writers at local secondary schools and junior colleges.

[2] Yap's poetry is distinctive for an unusual linguistic playfulness and subtlety that is able to bridge the rhythms of Singlish with the precision of acrolectic English.

Anthony Burgess has written that he encountered Down the Line "with elation and occasional awe",[3] while D. J. Enright has praised Yap's "sophisticated cosmopolitan intelligence"[citation needed].

The Oxford Companion to 20th-Century Poetry describes Yap's poems as "original, but... demanding: elliptical, dense, dry, sometimes droll.

At their best, they shuttle between playfulness and sobriety and are alert to the rhythms and contours of the natural and the peopled landscape, seasoning insight with compassion.

At times he begins his verses as if in mid-conversation with the reader: should i also add:here are only lineslinked by the same old story.the same old plotin which they are grownThe pun on the word 'plot' in this passage, denoting both a storyline and a piece of land, suggests a dimensionality in the language that belies the dismissive adjective 'only'.

Other signature features of Yap's poems include his choice of simple words, and the use of all-lowercase style favoured by American poet E. E. Cummings.

In 2015, Down the Line was selected by The Business Times as one of the Top 10 English Singapore books from 1965 to 2015, alongside titles by Goh Poh Seng and Daren Shiau.

On 13 April 1969 Arthur Yap held his first solo art exhibition featuring 44 square abstract paintings at the National Library in Stamford Road.