Imin Yeh | Thank You For Understanding

Imin Yeh

Thank You For Understanding

Pittsburgh, USA: e.l.hymns, 2025

252 pp., 4.25” x 6.87”, softcover

Open Edition 

Imin Yeh teaches at Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh, and has been collecting student excuses for missing class for the past seven years, which are collected in Thank You For Understanding. The first and second editions were hand case bound by the artist. This third edition printing is in digest paperback, Yeh's favorite book dimension.

The title is vailable from the publisher, here, for $20.00 US. 

"The perfect holiday gift for the aging academic, optimistic new hire, or student entering the last third of the semester, Thank You for Understanding: Seven years of student excuses on why they will miss class, is now in the greatest of all book formats, the mass market digest. Fits in your jacket pocket! Meant for reading."

- Imin Yeh

Pittsburgh

We just got back from a week or so in Pittsburgh, where Roula installed a small exhibition at Gallery Closed. The window gallery, in the Troy Hill neighbourhood, is operated by artists Phillip Andrew Lewis and Lenka Clayton, from their studio. The enormous former bank building (complete with functional vault) has two street-facing windows, allowing the gallery to be permanently closed and also continuously open. 

For a fourteen month-long series called Exhibition Copy, works by artists in the window space spill out into neighbouring businesses, residences and nearby school. The series includes projects by Martin Creed, Louise Bourgeois, Roman Ondak, Ryan Gander and others. Roula created a party room scenario reminiscent of fish-bowl party spaces and play areas where children celebrate in full view of passersby (like the one in the Rainbow Cinema in Toronto, which we keep threatening to host a party in for our friend Jon Sasaki). Balloons from the party appear to have drifted off and become lodged in the other windows. The painted cast resin balloons can be seen in the window for Ron’s Pizza Palace, a Public Notary Office, a former Beauty Salon and several other adjacent spaces. 

Troy Hill is also home to several “Art Houses”, the brainchild of collector Evan Mirapaul, who buys up dilapidated homes and invites artists to transform them into installation spaces. German artist Thorsten Brinkmann produced the first one, complete with Being John Malkovich style half-floors and passages to crawl through. Polish artist Robert Kusmirowski’s Kunzhaus followed in 2016. 

The most extraordinary of the three is Lenka and Phillip’s Darkhouse Lighthouse, which gutted the original home and built an elaborate lighthouse inside it. Mark Dion is currently working on the fourth home. A fifth possible space is currently covered in vines, with bricks from the crumbling chimney threatening to fall from the roof. All are located within a block or two of each other, with Gallery Closed close by. 

Affordable space in Pittsburgh means that artists can often rent out spaces and create DIY museums, billboards and restaurants. Jon Rubin (a co-curator of the Exhibition Copy series and one of our excellent hosts) has done all three. His work often explores the authority of text in the public realm, and his projects include Waffle Shop (Talk Show), The National Museum and the renowned Conflict Kitchen. More on these in future posts. 

Rich Pell has operated the Centre for Post-Natural History for about a decade. I was expecting a thrifty studio space with some objects on makeshift tables, but the presentation was top-notch, with a full library of books, museum-quality glass cases, audio descriptions, projected films and taxidermied animals. 

The week was pretty packed, and we only managed to visit three bookstores: Fungus Books and Bottom Feeder (both excellent and around the corner from each other) and Caliban, which - we later learned - was involved in an eight million dollar heist, regarding prints and plates cut from books from the Carnegie Library (read the story, here, at the Smithsonian site). 

Over the next week or so I’ll try to get to the above titles, which tell the larger story of some of the great places we visited. 

Imin Yeh | dreamcabin

Imin Yeh

dreamcabin

Brooklyn, USA: Small Editions, E.L. Hymns (Paul Mullins), 2022

150 pp., 20.32 x 20.32 cm., softcover

Edition of 525

Following a brief bout with postpartum insomnia, the artist's partner proposed imagining a place and building it in her mind as she drifts off to sleep nightly. Yeh envisioned an A-frame lakeside cabin for her new family. Once her child was sleep-trained she began building the home at a 1:12 scale, out of Covid19 quarantine refuse, such as take out food containers and shipping boxes. 

The artist imagines the home while falling asleep and builds it (see below) during her daughter's nap time. 

As of November 2020, Dreamcabin has been festooned with miniature artworks contributed by dozens of artists, including Lenka Clayton (herself an expert on maintaining a prolific practice during early motherhood), Roula Partheniou, Zachary Rapaport, Cindy Hsu and many others. The bookwork documents both the dreamcabin and the numerous interventions by other artists. 

The title is available from Printed Matter, here, for $40.00 US ($36.00 for members). Visit the artist's website here: https://iminyeh.info and follow her on Instagram here: https://www.instagram.com/iminyeh. 

Imin Yeh | Studio Snack Sculpture

Imin Yeh

Studio Snack Sculpture

Minneapolis, USA: Self-published, 2021

Sizes vary

Edition size unknown

Watercolor and acrylic paint on paper, yupo, tracing paper salt, glue, gloss medium.

Imin Yeh | Sad Career Erasers

Imin Yeh

Sad Career Erasers

Minneapolis, USA: Bohemian Press, 2019

3” x 3” x 1”

Edition of 50

Published with the Bohemian Press at the University of Minnesota, Sad Career Erasers is a 14 colour screenprint on KitaKata paper in the form of childhood erasers kept by the artist's father for 30 years, one from each of this three children. 

"The paper replicas of these erasers exist as small time capsules, nostalgic memories for children of the 80s. The original erasers have really no sentimental or fiscal value. At this point, they barely have an utility, their rubber degraded past a place of usefulness. But they survived three decades because my father is who he is and now, even longer, because he has a daughter like me." 

- Imin Yeh

Imin Yeh | I'm In Ya

Imin Yeh
I'm In Ya
Pittsburgh, USA: Self-published, 2019
[144] pp.,  7.62 x 12 cm., softcover
Edition of 200

Available from Printed Matter, here, for $20.00 US.


"In March of 2016, somebody made fun of my name, as it appeared on my Facebook profile. 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.

‘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 naming their daughter. The text of ‘I’m in Ya’ is each message I received, as it appeared in my inbox. The images are reproductions, drawn in colored pencil, of the sender’s profile picture. "

- Imin Yeh