Image: Robert Klein Gallery, Boston
An opening reception for the exhibition will take place on Saturday, October 10, from 2–5 PM.
Spanning the 1940s through the 1980s, the exhibition traces an extraordinary body of work shaped by war, revolution, migration, and cultural realignment. Moving between China, Hong Kong, and the United States, Yee created a humanistic photographic record of Chinese experience across shifting political, geographic, and cultural landscapes.
Titled ‘Between Two Shores,’ the exhibition presents migration not as a singular journey from one place to another, but as a continual negotiation of identity, memory, and belonging.
It includes vintage gelatin silver prints, many made by Yee in the 1960s. Across these periods, recurring motifs of thresholds, shadows, architectural divisions, and figures in transition form a visual language reflecting questions of migration, belonging, and identity.
Yee was born in China in 1936 and immigrated to the United States from Guangdong in 1952. He began photographing as a middle school student in southern China.
In the United States, distance from his homeland gives way to a more contemplative and introspective way of seeing.
The exhibition also reintroduces Yee to New England audiences through his earlier solo exhibitions at the Peabody Essex Museum and the Addison Gallery of American Art.
