BIOGRAPHY
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 has a forthcoming two-person exhibition with the artist Michael Hall at Catharine Clark Gallery in the spring of this year. Since the opening of EXiT, the gallery’s art bookstore, in 2023, Imin’s hand-made books, prints, and other works on paper have been prominently featured. 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.
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Imin Yeh, Dream Cabin, 2022. Offset printed, perfect bound, die cut, silver foil. 8 x 8 inches. Edition of 525. $45
About this work: “I had a month long bout with postpartum insomnia and my partner Paul Mullins gave me sage advice from his lifelong wrangle with sleeplessness. He said to try to imagine a place and build it in my mind. That place ended up being a lakeside A-frame cabin for the three of us. Lemmy is sleep trained now so I’m building the house in 1:12 scale from the take out and shipping boxes from our quarantine. I think about all the details and how to build it while going to sleep each night and I work on it during her nap times. Since November 2020, dreamcabin has been filled with artworks contributed by dozens of artists, often arriving completely by surprise in the mail.” – Imin Yeh Dream Cabin, the book, is typeset in TW Cent MT on 100# flo-gloss text paper, with a die cut and foil stamped cover on forest green Colorplan paper. Photography by Jacquelyn Johnson. Copy Editing by Leslie Gordon. This book is designed and laid out by Imin Yeh and is published through their imprint E.L.Hymns with support by Small Editions. This publication was made possible by a Creative Development Award from the Heinz Endowments, Pittsburgh PA.
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Imin Yeh, Black Book, 2017. Screenprint, laser print, risograph print. 4 x 4 inches. Edition of 7. $75
This sweet little book was Imin Yeh + office supplies + use of a laserjet and risograph printer in slightly inappropriate ways. Most of the book is only visible when you hold it in your hand. You should hold it in your hand.
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Imin Yeh, Lemmy’s Gift, 2021. Risograph print. 7 x 5 inches (packaged). Edition of 115. $40
Lemmy’s Gift is an artist book with paper patterns to make eight observational and buildable geometric shapes; complete with a storage box and instructional zine. These shapes are the key forms and techniques behind the paper sculptures in my artistic practice. If you can master building these forms, you will find their structures repeated in almost any object you hope to recreate in paper. Humans invented paper out of the desire to leave records, sharing their ideas with as many people as possible. Paper is the material of childhood; children, without hesitation, make anything they want on and out of paper. It is then, no surprise that these foundational shapes mirror Fröbel Gifts, the nearly 200 year old series of educational playthings developed by Friedrich Fröbel. Fröbel believed a lifetime of learning and the discovery of the world could begin with a simple wooden cube. I believe a lifetime of creativity begins with the limitless potential of a simple piece of paper. Lemmy’s Gift is just an introduction. This first edition is typeset in TW Cent MT and printed by risograph and laser print on French Paper. The shapes are plotter cut on Colorplan Paper. Designed, conceived, and published by Imin Yeh and their imprint ELHymns. The cover design borrows heavily from Observational Geometry by William T Campbell. Lemmy’s Gift was made possible in part by generous support from Play Mountain Exchange, a project directed by Isla Hansen, funded by the Center for the Arts in Society at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh PA.
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Imin Yeh, I'm in Ya, 2019. Silver foil cover, Indigo digital offset printing of 70 color pencil drawings. 5 x 3 1/4 inches. Edition of 200. $20 Imin Yeh explains, “This projects documents ten days of people making fun of my name on Facebook. In March of 2016, somebody made fun of my name, as it appeared on my Facebook profile. I know this because for 10 days, I received 70 + direct messages from strangers (all in the UK) making jokes about my name; referring to it as I’m In Ya (as in I’m In You). It took me a while to understand the joke. In my life, I had never thought of my name, Imin Yeh, in that way. My name, Imin Yeh, is the result of a very careful and deliberate decision process by my parents. They immigrated to this country in the mid 70s, but my siblings and I were born in the States. Many Asian immigrants in this situation choose to give their children American names, reserving their Chinese name as a middle name, or for use at home. My parents intentionally chose to keep our first names Chinese. My name is 葉艾明 (Yeh Ai-Ming), it is composed of a Family Surname (Yeh), and individual character (Ai) and a generational character (Ming). All of my siblings share a generational character, it is a common Chinese naming convention. Fearing that Ai-Ming Yeh would look too foreign or would be mocked, they tried their best to anglicize the spelling and settled on Imin Yeh, reserving Samantha as my middle name so that I could have a choice. Finally, aware of discrimination towards women, my father chose gender neutral names to give to his two daughters. This is the way I have always thought about and loved my name.” I’m in Ya is about a strange event surrounding a strange name. It is also a story about parents who thought carefully and seriously about how to merge two languages and two cultures into the name of their daughter. The text of I’m in Ya is set in Space Groetsk and is of each message received, as it appeared in my inbox. The images are reproductions, drawn in colored pencil, of the sender’s profile picture. I’m in Ya was supported in part by funding from the College of Fine Arts Fund for Research and Creativity. EXiT at Catharine Clark Gallery | cclarkgallery.com | 6
Imin Yeh, Paper Paper Film, 2019.Box Size: 9 1/2 x 6 1/2 x 2 inches. Edition of 52. $800 Paper Paper Film is an artist facsimile of a 1983 educational film box set on printing and paper. The original box set was published in 1983, purchased by the Carnegie Mellon University in 1987, found in the storage closet at Carnegie Mellon University in 2016, and published in the form of a paper sculpture by the Women’s Studio Workshop in Rosendale, NY in 2019. WSW is funded in part by the New York State Council on the Arts, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts. The box is Silver Foil stamped onto Vermillion ColorPlan paper wrapped around book board. The foam is hand built from die cut handmade cotton paper, dyed foam grey with glitter. The Film Canisters and Cassettes are hand built out of Bright Red Colorplan paper with screenprint, rives BFK, Acetate and laser print. The Receipt is printed on Awagami Murakuno Kozo Select Natural digital inkjet washi paper, with hand cut perforations and dot matrix printer holes. Finally, The Paper Paper Film Book is Digital printed and perfect bound with a handmade cotton paper cover, letterpressed in Twentieth Century. It includes digital photographs of the projected film strip on Paper and a transcription of the original cassette tape. This work has been acquired by the following institutions: Hunt Library, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA; Indiana University, Bloomington IN; Rochester Institute of Technology, NY; University of Delaware, Newark, DE; Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, NY; Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA; Yale University, New Haven, CT; University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI; The Library of Congress, Washington, DC; Bucknell University, Lewisburg, PA; University of San Diego, San Diego, CA; University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, AR; Baylor, Waco, TX; Bennington College, Bennington, VT; Harvard University, Cambridge, MA; Ohio University, Athens, OH; Ringling College of Art and Design, Sarasota, FL; The New York Public Library, New York, NY; University of Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA. EXiT at Catharine Clark Gallery | cclarkgallery.com | 7
Imin Yeh, Needle Book, 2023. Collaboration with Jacquelyn Johnson. Screenprint on Lenox 100, etching on Kitaka, sewing thread. 1 x 1 1/8 inches. Edition of 20. $100.
Vintage needle packaging is paper magic, especially a reproduction of one that houses a tiny artist book of a playful black length of thread.
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Imin Yeh, Fold Ready, 2023. Bone folder, sticker. 5 inch bone folder tethered to a 25 inch retractable pocket holster. Edition of 100. $25
A retractable bone folder for being ready to properly fold, anywhere, anytime.
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Imin Yeh, Miniaturia, 2022. Digial print, perfect bound. 1/2 x 3/4 inches. Open Edition. $10
Miniature hand perfect book filled with to-scale drawings of tiny things.
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Imin Yeh, Some Doodles, 2023. Graphite, paper, screenprint. 1 x 1 x 1/5 inches. Edition of 20. $75
A 1:12 scale trapper keeper with the doodles I still can remember drawing from my childhood. Plus bonus drawing by Lemmy.
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Imin Yeh, Bugs by Lennox, 2023. Digital print, paper. 1 x 1 x 3/8 inches. Open edition. $25
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Imin Yeh, The Peas, 2023. Risograph print, handbound book. 1 x 3/4 inches. Open Edition. $40
A collection of small peas with big feelings.
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Imin Yeh, A Sculpture for the Future, 2020. Risograph Print. 9 x 6 inches unfolded. Open edition. $10
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Imin Yeh, Some Lost Hair Ties, 2024 Acrylic paint on paper. 4 1/2 x 4 1/2 x 3/8 inches. Edition of 50. $50
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Imin Yeh, Track a Year, 2022. Lettepress print, perforated risograph. 9 x 9 inches. Open edition. $30
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Imin Yeh, Thank you for Understanding, 2023. Digital print, hand bound casebound book. 7 x 4 1/4 x 1 inches. Edition of 5, signed. $250
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Imin Yeh, Star Bolts, 2020. Paper. 11 1/2 x 11 1/2 x 3 inches. Edition of 10. $200
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Imin Yeh, Some Bugs, 2023. Digital print on Awagami paper (stinkbug), copper plate etching, wax, and paper (Lantern Fly). 1 3/4 x 1 3/4 x 1 inches. Edition of 20. $100
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Imin Yeh, My Sister's Chinese Dictionary, 2019. Screenprint on Paper. 6 x 8 x 2 inches. Edition of 5. $800
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Imin Yeh, Film Projector (for Paper Paper Film), 2020. Acrylic paint, screenprint ink on rives BFK. Digital print on Gampi. 6 x 9 x 8 inches. Edition of 5. $1500
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Imin Yeh, Saltines, 2023. Screenprint, hand perforated/hole punched paper. 2 1/8 x 2 1/8 inches. Edition of 19. $50
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Imin Yeh, iPhone Chargers, 2016 and 2019. Rives BFK, Watercolor, Graphite. Dimensions of box: 5 1/4 x 4 1/4 x 3 1/2 inches. Edition of 15. Only one edition available. $150
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Imin Yeh, Drawer of Extra Sauce, 2019. Screenprint and wax on paper. 1 x 4 inches (each). Edition of 25. $150
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Imin Yeh, Dad's Tape, 2022. Acrylic on paper, yupo. Approximately 3 x 6 x 2 1/2 inches. Edition of 5. $750
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Imin Yeh, Almond Jello, 2023. Acrylic on paper, book cloth covered clamshell box. 5 x 5 x 3 1/2 inches. Edition of 6. $500
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Imin Yeh, A Perfect Shaving, 2021. Watercolor on Kitakata paper, handmade clamshell box from snackboard. 5 1/4 x 3 1/4 x 1 inches. Edition of 6. $500
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Imin Yeh, Spare Scissors, 2023. Paper. 10 x 4 x 1 inches. Edition of 18. $250 Reticulating paper copy of my favorite scissors, complete with a paper screw to hang them on the wall.
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