Between Two Shores: Richard Yee 1940s–1980s
此岸彼岸 - 趙羨藻 攝影展
October 10 - December 12, 2026
Between Two Shores: Richard Yee (趙羨藻), 1940s–1980s examines the photographic practice of Richard Yee across four transformative decades spanning China, Hong Kong, and the United States. Working amid war, revolution, colonial transition, and migration, Yee developed a body of work that resists fixed national or stylistic categories. His photographs document everyday life under historical pressure while articulating a transnational visual language shaped by movement, displacement, and cultural negotiation.
The title 此岸彼岸 (literally “This Shore, That Shore”) evokes Buddhist philosophy, in which the two shores symbolize the passage between states of being: past and future, belonging and displacement, tradition and transformation. For Yee, photography became a means of inhabiting this in-between space - bearing witness to historical rupture while searching for continuity of identity and cultural memory.
In China, Yee’s early images bear witness to social upheaval with a humanist sensitivity; in Hong Kong, his work reflects the city’s role as a liminal site of transit and modernity; in the United States, distance and diaspora give rise to a more introspective, reflective mode of seeing. Across these contexts, recurring motifs—thresholds, shadows, architectural divides, and figures in transition—reveal a consistent engagement with questions of belonging and identity.
The exhibition also highlights Yee’s historical connection to the New England region through his exhibitions at the Peabody Essex Museum and the Addison Gallery of Art in the 1980s, reaffirming his place within New England’s photographic and artistic history. By situating Richard Yee within both the broader narrative of mid-20th-century Chinese diasporic photography and the local cultural landscape, Between Shores expands existing accounts of photographic modernism while offering a resonant meditation on migration, memory, cultural continuity, and the act of seeing across borders.
