The School of Art is excited to welcome interdisciplinary, project-based artist Imin Yeh as full-time faculty in 2D & print media. Yeh works in sculpture, installation, participatory events, and print, with paper as the most recurrent element.
Yeh’s projects use repetitive handcraft and mimicry as a strategy for exploring the issues around the unseen labor and production that lies behind our many unconsidered everyday objects.
“Conceptually, I chose this material because in it’s transformation from a commonplace material into a precious Art object, it retains a human and bodily investment of time. More honestly, I choose to work with paper because of a lifetime of confidence. It’s the material of a childhood spent cutting and building, with an almost 100% guarantee of no major loss to either bank account or limbs,” says Yeh. “The near invisibleness of my laborious projects, the utter lack of utility in either function or value, the absence of color, 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.”
Yeh comes to Pittsburgh from California, where she was an adjunct professor and teaching artist at Stanford University, San Jose State University, and California College for the Arts. In 2009 she received her Masters in Fine Arts from CCA, while her undergraduate degree was completed at University of Wisconsin, in Art History and Fine Arts with a focus in Asian arts.
Yeh has exhibited her work extensively throughout California, at San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum, Contemporary Jewish Museum, Kala Art Institute, Recology, and Southern Exposure among others. She has received fellowships and awards from the San Francisco Arts Commission and Fleishhacker Foundation, and has been actively engaged in arts education discourse through lectures, print exchanges, and public projects. “A small object, a gesture, or a voice from the margins can reclaim a space, be a catalyst of thought, or at the very least, provide a bit of wonder and magic.”
Examples of Yeh’s participatory practice can be found in recent projects “Phone Jack” and “Paper Orange Peel”. Both begin with a downlodable PDF, wherein users are instructed to cut, fold, and leave these items around physical sites. Once placed, users are encouraged to either email or instagram their pieces, completing Yeh’s loop of IRL <-> online print gestures.