Grief Mask (Unguarded Moment), BK

• Kiliii Yuyan is a photographer whose background is Nanai/Hèzhé (East Asian indigenous) on his mother’s side and Chinese American on his father’s – as he notes, a rich ancestral mix of both the “colonizer” and the “colonized.” While his home base is in Seattle, he spends much of his time using his camera to bear witness to the life ways of indigenous peoples living in the Arctic polar region. The vivid folk tales recounted to him by his maternal grandmother and her concern that he not forget his native Siberian roots, have helped inspire his extensive photo documentation of indigenous cultures like that of the Yup’ik. The Yup’ik peoples settled in some of the most remote places on the planet, including Gambell, Alaska, which is located on St. Lawrence Island in the Bering Sea, population about 700. Determined to prove to the inhabitants of Gambell that his goals were more empathetic and collaborative than those of a casual photojournalist, in 2018, Kiliii proposed an art therapy program for high school students to help counter the longstanding cultural trauma and excessive rates of suicide, alcoholism, and drug abuse suffered by the community. He suggested that the children make papier-maché masks that might represent their innermost feelings – ranging from deepest grief to greatest joy – and he was struck when they chose to be photographed in them, most often wearing the masks of grief out of doors and the masks of joy at home.