Richard Yee: Between Two Shores

此岸彼岸

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

China · Hong Kong · United States

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.

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.

Rather than presenting migration as a linear narrative of departure and arrival, the exhibition proposes shore-crossing as a sustained condition. Yee’s images resist assimilation into a single national or stylistic category; instead, they articulate a transnational visual language shaped by lived experience across multiple political and cultural systems.