© Kiliii Yuyan
Kiliii Yuyan on living off-road and photographing Arctic communities with an Indigenous lens
Few photographers spend more time on the road than Kiliii Yuyan, who travels up to 300 days a year. A Maryland-born descendent of both Nanai (Siberian Native) and Chinese immigrants, he roams the Arctic to live alongside and document Indigenous populations whose customs and cultures often remind him of his own ancestors.
Aside from the intrepid feat of Yuyan’s images—they require long flights and rocky boat rides into sub-zero climates, and living in remote villages— his work accomplishes something rarely found in “extreme travel photography.” His pictures do not strain to be “epic” in subject-matter. Instead, the scenes are often quiet and isolated. But his graphically assembled compositions, with strong lines and interwoven positive and negative shapes, bring forth an image that demands to be looked at with a tender and curious eye. This flips the awestruck, aloof, and often predatory Western gaze that traces back to the earliest days of travel photography.
Yuyan, who now lives in Seattle, is a member of Natives PhotographIndigeonous Photograph and Diversify Photo. Quarantine has grounded much of his travels, but it hasn’t stopped him from shooting new work and publishing a book, “Chukotka,” out this year through Kris Graves Projects.
We talked to Yuyan about living on the road, photographing people who live off of the land, and approaching every project with an Indigenous lens.
Quinn Russell Brown in conversation with Kiliii Yuyan
A Chukchi dance group performs at the port of Provideniya, Russia, for tourists. Chukchi and Yup'ik indigenous communities make up a significant portion of Chukotka's population, though many have been displaced several times over the past century. Dance and ceremony remain strong within their cultures.
© Kiliii Yuyan from his book Chukotka
Quinn Russell Brown: The last time we talked, in January, you told me that you had traveled 300 days last year. I was genuinely shocked. How do you maintain a personal identity that is separate from your work, or is that not possible?
Kiliii Yuyan: It’s only a certain type of person that this works for. I've traveled my entire life. My parents were moving all the time. It created me and made me who I am, in the sense that I'm very adaptable to be dropped into most situations and figure out how to survive there, and eventually how to thrive.
The flip side is that it makes it hard to stay in one place. I can get antsy. I do think the pandemic is showing me that that's not necessarily true, though. I've really been enjoying being in one place.
Whaling is community. It takes a village to pull up a whale," says whaling captain Ned Arey. This bowhead, caught by Arey crew, is being pulled onto the ice by dozens of Iñupiat, who work tirelessly for 8 hours or more. This whale took broke through the thin sea ice several times before being abandoned due to the danger-- a major symptom of the warming Arctic Ocean. © Kiliii Yuyan from his series People of the Whale.
Flora Aiken gives a silent blessing to the first bowhead whale of the spring season. The Iñupiaq have a rich spiritual life that centers around the gift of the whale to the community. Foster Simmonds offers a prayer, saying, "Hide something for me. Look at the food, the whales. Look at the sea, the whalers. A blessing for them. Take that and hide it in your heart." The whale here is tied up after being towed to the ice's edge and is awaiting the village to come and help haul it onto the ice. © Kiliii Yuyan from the series People of the Whale
Brown: Do you think you're compelled to make work that’s about your life, or is it more that your life is informed by the work that you're making?
Yuyan: The funny thing for me is that my self-identity is a mix: I am of Indigenous descent. I am of Asian descent. I’m American. And I am very much all of those things.
But also, I derive a large part of my identity through my work, and the places I travel to. There are some years when I spend five or six months in the Arctic, which is something that hardly anyone can say if they're not living there or from one of the Arctic villages. The Arctic really doesn't have any cities. So, in a way, my identity is very Arctic-based—I’m very much an Arctic person—and yet I have to travel there to be that.
Upright whale jawbones mark a ceremonial site for a former indigenous village at Cape Dezhnev, Russia. Indigenous villagers were forcibly relocated to and from this location several times before it was eventually vacated permanently as a way to make villages more manageable under the Soviet system.
© Kiliii Yuyan from his book Chukotka
Brown: When you're traveling to the Arctic or doing Indigenous stories in general, is there an autobiographical journey going on, where you’re looking for echoes of your own ancestors? Or, is it more like, “I'm really interested in these types of stories, and while they’re not necessarily reflective of the journey that happened generations before me, I can still relate.”
Yuyan: It’s both of those things. The thing that put me on the path to becoming who I am is the search for my homeland. In some ways I felt that my story, my homeland and my culture had been stolen from me. The Cultural Revolution in China forced my family to become refugees. It’s just another story of colonization. The interesting thing about this particular story is that it affected millions of Chinese people who fled to Taiwan. So it’s not just the story of Indigenous people, it’s the story of an entire nation.
I'm drawn to the Arctic particularly because my ancestors are sub-Arctic. It’s a place where ice and snow are deeply embedded in the stories that I grew up with. Another thing that drives me to search out these stories is that I love subsistence peoples. The connection to the land is a language: once you're a part of it, there’s a deeper understanding. I speak that language. Being a hunter and a fisherman, someone who spends a lot of time outdoors, I know that when I hop into a subsistence culture, that I am going to be expected to do things like haul wood or help to butcher a seal. But that's what I love doing: That's who I am. That simple pragmatism is deeply embedded in me. My parents instilled that in me: When something has to be done, you need to do it.
That particular combination of pragmatism, along with land-based skills, is something that I love. I love seeing going to different places and seeing the particular strain of how people have figured out how to live with that land. The land dictates how cultures develop and then their subsequent stories. In a way, a lot of these stories that I work on are relevant, contemporary looks at cultures and places that are really timeless.
On the Arctic Ocean, Iñupiaq paddle their umiaq skinboat. A Fata Morgana mirage makes their umiaq appear to float over the sea. Spring whaling by umiaq is made possible by the shorefast sea ice. As the sea ice gets thinner each spring from a warming climate, traditional whaling becomes increasingly challenging.
© Kiliii Yuyan from the series People of the Whale
Meet Kiliii Yuyan. Portrait © Quinn Russell Brown
Brown: Your work is in lockstep with your approach and attitude to life. And when we talk about who should be permitted to shoot a story, I would say it’s bigger than applying a strict equity lens, than simply asking, “Which is the right ethnicity to shoot this story?”
Yuyan: It’s more complicated than that. There are different reasons to hire for diversity. One of them is for the perspective. Another is to make sure that we're bringing people in to give them an opportunity. But then there’s one that we don’t talk about much, which is access. Someone like me can walk in and people are like, “We know what you look like. You remind us of us.” I understand enough about the cultures to know what to do and what not to do. I know how to just hang out with people. I have that slow patience.
A good example is whaling. Ninety-nine percent of it is sitting around and waiting on a chunk of ice for something to go by. Lots of people are not going to have that patience. But I get that, and it’s not just because I was raised that way, but it’s bigger: I aspire to understand what it’s like to see the world in a deeply nature-related way. For me to slow down is self-improvement, not just a job I’m doing.
Wearing the mantra of Standing Rock Sioux, Water is Life, a young woman at the Oceti Sakowin camp looks out over an estimated ten thousand people gathered there. To the Sioux, fighting for water and land is not an intellectual exercise, it is a fight for the health of the people. © Kiliii Yuyan from the series Standing Rock
Dorothy Bird, a Crow Creek Sioux, holds a photograph of her grandfather. For the Dakota, the fight at Standing Rock goes deeper than the pipeline with a history that has affected generations. James Sazue, also of Crow Creek says, “A lot of people didn’t think they would ever see this happen again. The last battle.”
© Kiliii Yuyan from his series Standing Rock
Brown: You did commercial photography for a little bit. What did you learn from that?
Yuyan: A lot of technical stuff. Learning to light was really valuable. I learned how to get things done in this sort of Western workflow: how you talk with art directors, that everyone shows up, that we get everyone paid. It seems small, but it’s pretty large.
Brown: To me, you construct your images in a way that's very technical, even if it’s intuitive at this point. To assemble bold lines and strong shapes like that, you have to be somewhat of a craftsman.
Yuyan: That's probably because I went to school for design. I learned a lot about composition and drawing. Art education is something that's been on my mind quite a bit lately. Just being a part of the modern world—being in cities—is a level of art education that a huge number of disadvantaged aspiring artists don't get, especially remote, Indigenous people. This art education comes from every time you sit on the bus and look at the billboards going by, the architecture, the paintings on the wall. When you live in wild areas, and you're not looking at human-generated art at all, you're not absorbing those things all the time.
Indigenous activists, and just generally Indigenous cultures, are trying to decolonize their storytelling. It’s partly the form: Two-dimensional printed visual work is distinctly a colonial thing, whereas oral storytelling is not. Right now, opportunity for many minority visual artists is opening—in particular after the BLM protests, but in the last couple of years, things have really skyrocketed. The problem is far from solved, but people are hiring, and it’s a good start.
Yet particularly for Indigenous, we have a photographer pipeline problem: The pipe is there, but there’s not enough to fill the pipe. The number of young, particularly rural, Indigenous artists who are trying to come in, and have the requisite skill at the base level, is quite low. And a lot of that has to do with this osmosis of our education by being in cities. Just think about how much great art can be seen in New York City on the street alone. You don't have to go into a museum or read a book to look at these things.
The good thing about opportunity, though, is that people with potential can be nurtured and grow in amazing ways. For real equity, we can’t solely look for marginalized artists whose work is already top-notch.
Every evening, someone climbs the ridges overlooking camp to check for movement from ever-present nearby wildfires. Lynx fires an arrow into the valley to express her gratitude for their safety.
© Kiliii Yuyan from the series Stone Age
A village dog gnaws on walrus remains from a walrus kill on the shoreline of Uelen.
© Kiliii Yuyan from his book Chukotka
Brown: What do you find your role to be as a contemporary Indigenous visual artist?
Yuyan: I’m trying to be very much me, but I'm also trying to be a bridge between Asian American culture and Indigenous American culture. I’m part of two diasporas: one is a huge diaspora, which is China, and the other is tiny, which is Nanai. Because of this, my real strength is not in talking about one specific community. I understand global Indigenous and thematic issues: things that are affecting people across continents. I'm interested in the local specifics, of course, but I think the set of skills I have lends itself to seeing patterns within Indigeneity. I often prefer regional stories to be covered by the people who are already deeply tied to a place.
A Chukchi woman rows a child's umiaq, or skinboat, across a tidal lake at the village of Lorino, Russia. Though largely replaced by aluminum skiffs for hunting, the umiaq remains an important part of the cultural heritage for both Chukchi and Yup'ik peoples. © Kiliii Yuyan from his book Chukotka
Brown: You and I went to the Eddie Adams Workshop in different years, but we had the same team leaders: Tim Rasmussen, former director of photography at ESPN, and Preston Gannaway, a Pulitzer-Prize winning documentary photographer. One of the things they said to me was, “In photojournalism, you are given an assignment, and within that assignment, you have to go find the story.” A lot of people may think we’re handed a neatly packaged story to go pursue, but it’s not that simple. For you, when you’re given an assignment and heading into the field, how do you even start to narrow down what you're looking for?
Yuyan: What Tim and Preston have to say is pure gold!
I was just talking to a guy in Alberta who heads up his nation about bison restoration, and I was trying to find a time and place to photograph the buffalo harvest. And he kept thinking I wanted pictures of bison standing out on the plains. That's cool, maybe I'll get some of those, but the most important thing is culture: I want to see people handling the buffalo, to see youth being taught that, to see people tanning the buffalo hide, or hanging out with a buffalo. I know the story and the themes, so I go in looking for those particular things, but I also know l don't want to photograph what everyone else has photographed before.
Reflecting on the grief in his life from losing a good friend to suicide, BK becomes quiet.
© Kiliii Yuyan from the series Masks of Grief and Joy
A basketball court sits empty in the village of Gambell, Alaska. Several youth I spoke to me told me the recent suicide of a friend who loved the game has kept them away from the court.
© Kiliii Yuyan from the series Masks of Grief and Joy
Brown: Let's talk about your assigned work. You’re a NatGeo contributor and an expert on-board their expeditions. You also do a lot of personal work. Do you approach those two worlds differently?
Yuyan: When it's self-assigned, I have more freedom to go after stuff that doesn't provide information. I can pursue things that are purely aesthetic or emotive, not just for the sake of supporting a story. I can let my instinct guide me more. So the pressure part of it is different, and that produces different images. When you're on assignment, there's a little bit of self-censorship: You’re more conservative, you shoot more safeties. The starting point for an assignment and a self-assignment might be the same, but with self-assigned work, there's a lot of wandering. If I find something cool, I can dive down a tangential path and let the story shift: I can reformulate the theme or the story altogether.
Girls in the city of Provideniya, Russia, embrace village dogs. The city itself is a mix of reclaimed concrete structures from the Soviet era that have been brightly repainted and refurbished, although many remain abandoned. © Kiliii Yuyan from the book Chukotka
Brown: When I was planning for a trip to Laos to visit my in-laws, and I told you I wanted to make some pictures while I was there, you told me not to think about the big, sweeping story of the country or culture, but instead to focus on a smaller thing—whether it be a simple routine or slice of life. Can you go into that more?
Yuyan: When you look down closer, it's more intimate, and with things that are more intimate, it's much easier to make something that moves people. The most powerful photographs are the ones that move us. We don't have to define how they move us: Some people are moved by architecture, and others are moved by a protester on the street. When we're looking at these epic-scale topics—these huge themes or vast viewpoints—then we can miss that. It’s not to say that there aren't large-scale things done well, but I think it’s much harder to do, because the big things come from the brain. The small things are so human, and when you let your instinct take over, they come from the heart.
Of course, when you feel called to something, you can't say no to it. If I’m flying in on a plane and I see a vast expanse of ice, and it moves me, that’s still a photograph I have to take, even if that’s not really the story I want to tell.
Chukotka. Published by Kris Graves Projects
Brown: Let’s talk about your upcoming monograph, “Chukotka,” which is published by Kris Graves Projects. It features photographs of the region in Northeastern Siberia. How did that project come about?
Yuyan: I was at a portfolio review and a big publisher was talking to me about doing a book. I sat down with Kris and he said, “You would make a really great book with those guys. It would be big and it would be a coffee table book, and it’s the kind of thing that artists want to make. But then no one would be able to afford it, especially the people you want to see it the most.” I thought about it for like 10 seconds and I knew he was absolutely right. The people who need to see the work are the people who are in it, and the viability of sending them a lot of copies would be hampered by how expensive it would be. Also, with this whole notion of art education and disadvantaged people: If a book is $25, people are more likely to be able to buy it or read it in a library.
I had just gotten back from a 13-day trip to Chukotka, and I sent Kris the images. He said, “These are fantastic. Let’s make a book of this.” Every picture is both new and surprising to me, but also familiar because I understand the Arctic landscape and Arctic cultures. I’m not picky about the specific images chosen; I’m more interested in how the images flow together in a group. I’m not a tweaker about the lightness of the tones and the colors. Either the photographs move me, and the series moves me, or it doesn’t.
Indigenous hunters and fishermen from the village of Lorino, in Russia's Chukotka province, gather to wait out the pouring rain and stormy weather of a summer's day in the Arctic. Across the outskirts of the former USSR, industrial structures like these old shipping containers are commonly reclaimed.
© Kilii Yuyan form his book Chukotka
Brown: I'm interested in what you said about people being able to engage with the book. I’ll be honest, when I buy a photo book it often sits on my shelf like a mint-condition toy that’s still in the box. I'm looking at a Tina Barney book on my shelf right now. It probably cost me $60, and I’ve never opened it, but I get to know that I have a Tina Barney book, and it’s beautiful. How do you envision someone interacting with your book? If you were outside looking through the window and watching them open it, what would you be rooting for them to do?
Yuyan: I think it's 100% okay for them to get it in the mail, flip through a substantial portion of it, and then put it down on the table or put it away and not look at it again. Right now books are competing with Instagram, and if they’re not competing, then no one will look at them. And this is a small, throw-it-in-your-bag kind of book. It reaches people where they’re at.
My hope is that the images themselves surprise people enough that they’ll want to go back to them. I think there's a couple of pictures in there that people will show other people.
There’s one with a polar bear standing on the shore of a coastline, and there are basalt formations shooting out of the ground. There's a bunch of things going on that are really surprising: One is that it’s a polar bear that's not on ice. Also, polar bears mostly don't live in places with land formations; they’re typically seen on sea ice. So it dispels the notion that polar bears are only in one particular place doing one thing.
At the edges of the Bering Sea and Russia’s Arctic coastline lies one of the wildest regions on earth. This polar bear waits on a beach near sea stacks on Russia's Herald Island, for the return of the sea ice. The retreat of the summer ice in the western Chukchi Sea has concentrated hundreds of polar bears on this island and nearby Wrangel, so personal space for these non-social bears is limited.
© Kiliii Yuyan from the book Chukotka
Brown: It’s a gorgeous image. And in terms of cover design, the way that picture sits on the page is almost unexpected in itself.
Yuyan: Yeah, totally. Kris’ edits were really fantastic. The other image that is really surprising to me is the picture of the window with a bunch of spikes jutting out of it. I think that one's actually a little easy to brush past if you're looking at it quickly. But once you look deeper at it, and you notice that there are spikes coming out of a window, I think you’re inclined to ask the question, “What the hell is this?” I think that’s the kind of picture that makes people say to a friend, “Can you believe this? There's a place where people have to put spikes on their window to keep the bears out.
Iron spikes protrude from a protective cage built around this cabin's windows. These protections are omnipresent on Wrangel Island, where hungry polar bears regularly ransack structures searching for food.
© Kiliii Yuyan from his book Chukotka
Brown: Maybe this is an insensitive question, but do you think these animals are a metaphor for Indigenous people in some way? They’re clearly associated with Indigenous people, but I’m wondering if, when we see the polar bear out there on his own, is there a “lost culture” type of connection there? Or is that too much of an oversimplification?
Yuyan: I think there's some association with it. In some ways, it stems from the European explorer: the tall ship, getting lost in the ice, all of these exotic and foreign things that are coming together. But that’s not to say that there's not some accuracy to the idea that wherever polar bears are, the people have a really deep relationship with them.
An unusual phenomenon known as a sun pillar forms between above the sea ice on the Chukchi Sea. This type of refraction is only seen when the air is filled with ice crystals. © Kiliii Yuyan from the series People of the Whale
Brown: And that relationship might fundamentally not be understandable by the European perspective.
Yuyan: Definitely true. Colonial cultures, to a large extent, have a hard time understanding the notion that you can love something, fear it, and not want to change it, all at once.
Brown: Whaling seems like a great example.
Yuyan: Right, although I would say that’s only a seeming contradiction. You can kill something that is the most important thing to you. But that is nonsense to a Western audience, right? There are all of these pseudo-contradictions that many people have a hard time with, because they don’t sit well with things that are contradictory. But a lot of cultures don’t have trouble with this.
Kiliii Yuyan is one of PDN's 30 Emerging Photographers (2019) and a frequent contributor to National Geographic Magazine. His work has been exhibited internationally and can be seen on his website and on Instagram. His work has been exhibited internationally and can be seen on his website and on Instagram.
Quinn Russell Brown is a photographer, photo editor, and writer. Find more of his work here or on Instagram.