Richard Yee: Between Two Shores – 1940s–1980s

Richard Yee: Between Two Shores – 1940s–1980s
Oct 10, 2026 – Dec 12, 2026

United States United States — Photography Gallery
38 Newbury Street, Suite 402
Boston, MA 02116

Robert Klein Gallery presents Richard Yee: Between Two Shores – 1940s–1980s, on view from 10 October through 12 December 2026, tracing four transformative decades in the life and photographic practice of an artist who moved between China, Hong Kong, and the United States. The exhibition brings together a profoundly humanistic record of the Chinese experience across shifting political, geographic, and cultural landscapes, reintroducing Yee to New England audiences through his earlier solo exhibitions at the Peabody Essex Museum and the Addison Gallery of American Art.

Born in China in 1936, Yee immigrated to the United States from Guangdong in 1952. He began photographing as a middle school student in southern China, gaining early recognition for pictorial landscapes and documentary photographs made during the Chinese Civil War. After settling in the United States, he won First Prize in the Boston Globe Photo Contest for three consecutive years (1955, 1956, 1957) and received the Grand Award in the 1959 All U.S. Army Photo Contest. Active in international photography salons since 1960, he was ranked second in the 1968 Worldwide Photography Top Ten.

The title Between Two Shores—此岸彼岸 (literally "This Shore, That Shore")—draws upon Buddhist philosophy, where the two shores represent the passage between different states of being, from the familiar to the unknown, from one life to another. For Yee, photography became a way of inhabiting this threshold: bearing witness to historical upheaval while preserving memory, identity, and cultural continuity. Rather than presenting migration as a singular journey of departure and arrival, the exhibition proposes shore-crossing as an ongoing condition of existence.

The exhibition unfolds chronologically while revealing a remarkably consistent artistic vision. In China, Yee's early photographs document everyday life amid profound social change with a quiet humanist sensitivity that belies his youth. In Hong Kong, his images capture a city suspended between colonial modernity and Chinese tradition during a period when the population more than tripled, from 600,000 to 2.1 million, between 1945 and 1951 as refugees fled the civil war. In the United States, distance from his homeland gives rise to a more contemplative and introspective way of seeing.

Throughout these distinct periods, recurring motifs—thresholds, shadows, architectural divisions, and figures in transition—form a visual language that reflects enduring questions of migration, belonging, and identity. Yee's photographs resist easy national or stylistic classification, instead revealing a transnational vision shaped by lived experience across multiple political and cultural worlds. His work is celebrated for its warmth, humanity, and masterful use of light and texture, held in permanent collections including the Peabody Essex Museum, the Mariners' Museum, and the Seattle Art Museum.

By situating Yee within both the broader history of twentieth-century Chinese diasporic photography and New England's cultural landscape, Between Two Shores offers a timely meditation on migration, memory, cultural continuity, and the enduring power of photography to bridge worlds. Yee is represented exclusively in the United States by Robert Klein Gallery, which has shown his work alongside photographers such as Diane Arbus, Annie Leibovitz, Sally Mann, and Hiroshi Sugimoto since the gallery's establishment in 1980.

Image: West Village, Guangzhou, China 西村, 1949 © Richard Yee, courtesy of the Robert Klein Gallery


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