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 profoundly humanistic photographic record of the 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, 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.

The exhibition unfolds chronologically while revealing a remarkably consistent artistic vision. In China, Yee's early photographs made as a middle school student document everyday life amid profound social change with a quiet humanist sensitivity that belie 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 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.

Rather than presenting migration as a singular journey of departure and arrival, Between two shores proposes shore-crossing as an ongoing condition of existence. Yee's photographs resist easy national or stylistic classification, instead revealing a transnational vision shaped by lived experience across multiple political and cultural worlds.

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 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.