Richard Yee - Between Two Shores: 此岸彼岸 — 趙羨藻 攝影展

Richard Yee: Between Two Shores - 1940s-1980s
此岸彼岸 - 趙羨藻 攝影展
October 10 - December 12, 2026

Robert Klein Gallery is pleased to present Richard Yee: Between Two Shores, a solo exhibition exploring the life and photographic practice of Richard Yee across four transformative decades. 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.

The title Between Two Shores - 此岸彼岸 (literally "This Shore, That Shore") draws upon Buddhist philosophy, in which the two shores symbolize the passage between different states of being-from the familiar to the unknown, from one life to another. For Richard Yee, who emigrated to the United States at the age of fifteen in the aftermath of the Chinese Civil War, the metaphor resonates on both a personal and historical level. His photographs inhabit the space between homeland and adopted country, memory and history, tradition and modernity, transforming personal migration into a broader meditation on identity, cultural continuity, and the experience of diaspora.

The exhibition unfolds chronologically while revealing a remarkably consistent artistic vision. In China, Yee's earliest photographs, made while still a middle school student, document everyday life amid profound social change with a quiet humanist sensitivity that belied his youth. In Hong Kong, his images capture a city suspended between colonial modernity and Chinese tradition. In the United States, distance from his homeland gives way 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.

Rather than presenting migration as a singular journey from one place to another, Between Two Shores proposes shore-crossing as a continual negotiation of identity, memory, and belonging. The exhibition also reintroduces Richard Yee to New England audiences through his earlier solo exhibitions at the Peabody Essex Museum and the Addison Gallery of American Art, reaffirming his place within the region's photographic history. By situating Yee within the broader history of twentieth-century Chinese photography, the exhibition positions his work as a bridge between cultures, histories, and geographies, affirming photography's enduring power to preserve human experience across borders.

Richard Yee (b. China, 1936) immigrated to the United States from Guangdong, China, in 1952. He began photographing as a middle school student in southern China and gained early recognition for his pictorial landscapes and documentary photographs made during the Chinese Civil War. He went on to win First Prize in the Boston Globe Photo Contest for three consecutive years 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.

Yee's photographs are celebrated for their warmth, humanity, and masterful use of light and texture. Integral to his artistic practice, he personally produces each print using the traditional gelatin silver process, ensuring that every photograph faithfully reflects the vision he first conceived through the camera. Many of the works in the exhibition are vintage prints made by Yee dating back to the 1960s. His work has been presented in solo exhibitions at the Peabody Essex Museum, the National Museum of China, the Central Academy of Arts & Design in Beijing, the Addison Gallery of American Art, and the Hong Kong Arts Centre. His work is held in the permanent collections of the Peabody Essex Museum, the Mariners' Museum, the Seattle Art Museum, as well as other public and private collections. Richard Yee is represented exclusively in the United States by Robert Klein Gallery.