Imin Yeh (she/her) is an artist whose practice includes hand-made publications, sculpture, installation, and participatory projects. Her work expands our understanding of the role book making, paper, and print have played in the recording, copying, and spreading of the human story. The projects use handcraft and mimicry as a strategy for exploring the issues around unseen labor and production that lie beneath our many unconsidered everyday objects.
Imin notes that “Paper is the most recurrent element in my projects. Conceptually, I chose this material because in its transformation from a commonplace material into a precious art object, it retains a human and bodily investment of time. I have confidence working with paper since it is the material of my childhood, spent cutting and building, with an almost 100% guarantee of no major loss to either bank account or limb. The near invisibleness of my laborious projects, the utter lack of utility in either function or value, and the small, softly placed interventions are all a provocation to think about how much time and energy is invested in things we cannot or choose not to see. A small object, a gesture, or a voice from the margins can reclaim a space, be a catalyst for thought, or at the very least, provide a bit of wonder and magic.”
Imin’s hand-made books, prints, and other works on paper have been prominently featured in the gallery’s art bookstore EXiT (opened 2023). In 2024, EXiT presented Yeh’s work at CODEX IX. In the spring of 2024, Catharine Clark Gallery presented Yeh’ s solo exhibition titled A Salty Rainbow alongside Michael Hall’s presentation For Real Life.
Other recent exhibitions have been at Bass and Reiner (San Francisco, CA), Grizzly Grizzly (Philadelphia, PA), San Jose Museum of Art (CA), Asian Art Museum (San Francisco, CA), and the Contemporary Jewish Museum (San Francisco, CA). Her work is in the collections of many institutions including Stanford Library (CA), Vassar College (Poughkeepsie, NY), New York Public Library (NY), Harvard University (Cambridge, MA), The Library of Congress (Washington, DC), Yale University (New Haven, CT), San Jose Museum of Art (CA), the Hunt Library, Carnegie Mellon University (Pittsburgh, PA), among many others. Imin has been the recipient of a creative development award from the Heinz Foundation, a Eureka Fellowship from the Fleishhacker Foundation, and an Individual Artist Grant from the San Francisco Arts Commission. She is an Associate Professor of Print Media at Carnegie Mellon University School of Art, and lives and works in Pittsburgh, PA.
