VCUarts professor Michelle Yee explores Asian American art through Smithsonian fellowship

By Sophie Tran and Leila Ugincius

When Michelle Yee arrived at the Smithsonian Institution this summer, it was a homecoming of sorts.

Yee had once interned at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Now, two decades later as an assistant professor of art history at Virginia Commonwealth University, she returned to SAAM in a special research role - the 2026-27 Postdoctoral Fellow in Asian American Art.

"It feels awesome to be able to go back and to get to use those resources - this time as a researcher," said Yee, Ph.D., who teaches contemporary Asian art and Asian American art. "I think it's really special and really fun.

"Also," she joked, "it makes me feel really old."

Yee joined VCU's School of the Arts in 2022, and in her Smithsonian fellowship, she is studying how pre-1945 Asian Americans imagined the American landscape. Her research will be a part of her current book project, "Scattered Destinies: Landscape in Contemporary Asian American Photography."

"Land already carries a national mythology written through photography, painting and film," Yee said, and Asian perspective can be viewed, or overlooked, through a fractured lens.

"Asian Americans exist in a state of invisibility or hypervisibility," such as during the rise of anti-Asian hate in the COVID pandemic, "never simply 'being,'" she said.

Yee is looking for how photography contributed to the myth of America as vast and uninhabited - thus erasing the presence of Indigenous peoples. And, knowing that history, how do contemporary Asian American photographers manipulate the medium?

"These photographers reimagine the possibility of Asian Americans claiming lands and changing narratives from which their presence has been made invisible," she said.

Michelle Yee standing in front of Glenn Kaino, "Bridge," 2013-2014, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of the Smithsonian Secretary and the Smithsonian National Board and museum purchase through the Luisita L. and Franz H. Denghausen Endowment, 2022.34A-C, © 2013-2014, Glenn Kaino. (Photo by Avriel Glass)

Yee will also look at how the Smithsonian itself has structured the narrative of the American landscape through its own collecting and exhibition practices.

Her fellowship gives her access to archives at the Smithsonian Institution, including SAAM and the Archives of American Art, where she can search for sketches, photographs and writings by Asian American artists of earlier eras.

Understanding cultural production and the people behind it fascinates Yee. Her core interest is how Asian and Asian diasporic people exist, navigate and carve out belonging on American land.

At VCUarts, Yee shares that fascination with her students.

"That has been particularly gratifying because I get to teach these histories to students in a context here in Virginia," she said, noting that the state's demographics differ greatly from New York and California, where she previously taught. "Being able to learn a little bit more about immigration patterns and students' experiences living in [Virginia] has been really, really informative for me, to get to teach a different type of student."

She also wants her students to feel that their stories matter, and that they are equipped to think deeply about their visual worlds.

"For students who have felt like they haven't been represented, I hope they see something familiar," Yee said. And "it is so important to me that students walk out of my class feeling they are empowered to look at images and to face this world of visual bombardment in a critical and careful and thoughtful way."