Between Shores: Richard Yee (趙羨藻), 1940s–1980s

Between Shores explores the life and photographic work of Richard Yee (趙羨藻) across four pivotal decades marked by war, revolution, migration, and cultural realignment. Spanning China, Hong Kong, and the United States from the 1940s through the 1980s, Yee’s photography offers a rare visual record of the Chinese diaspora in motion—both geographically and psychologically. Yee emigrated from southern China after the Chinese civil war to the Boston area as a teenager in 1951.

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.