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Kira Yan

@yankirayan

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🇰🇷🇰🇿🇺🇿🇰🇬🇹🇯🇹🇲 As leaders gather for the Korea–Central Asia Summit, we share “Homecoming: Grandma” art piece (2026) to honor the Koryo-saram histories that link Korea, Central Asia, and the global diaspora

🇺🇸For many Koryo Saram Korean Americans, Central Asia is where our grandmothers lived, cooked, raised children, preserved Korean traditions, and made home after displacement.

👩🏻‍🎨 Koryo Saram artist Kira Yan brings this history into view: her grandmother in a kitchen, preparing food for family, rendered through layered materials that reflect the rippling and imperfect texture of memory. Acrylic, rhinestones, fabric, and adhesive evoke memory as something beautifully imperfect—layered, fragile, and still alive.

👵 Kira grandmother’s kitchen is more than a family scene—it’s a window into the history connecting Korea and the wider Central Asian region. Following the 1937 Soviet deportation of ethnic Koreans, Central Asia became home to the Koryo-saram. Today, that history lives on through families connected between Central Asia, South Korea, and the US.

👩🏻‍🎨 Kira Yan is a Koryo-saram visual artist born in Uzbekistan and based in Massachusetts, United States. With an MA in Curatorial Practices and Arts Management, Kira explores memory, belonging, displacement, and the connections between intimate everyday moments and wider social histories.

👩🏻‍🎨🎨 Please share and support Koryo-saram artists. Let’s celebrate cultural exchange and meaningful inclusion alongside our economic and political connections 🤝

#KoreaCentralAsiaSummit #KoryoSaram #CulturalDiplomacy #DiasporaArt #KoryoSaramInAmerica taken in Massachusetts, United States by @yankirayan

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21 days ago

🖼️“Homecoming” 🎨 2023

👩🏻‍🎨Artist: Koryo Saram Kira Yan, MA, USA

On this day of remembrance, we hold space for the Koryo Saram memory of home: for families forcibly uprooted from the Far East during the September 1937 deportations, and for generations who rebuilt their lives, preserved Korean culture, and forged belonging across Central Asia and beyond.

🖼️ Through Kira’s collage, “Homecoming”, we are reminded that home can be lost, carried, reimagined, and found again.

🇺🇿🇺🇸 Created from fragments of Uzbek books and magazines, and inspired by Kira’s move to the United States, this work reflects the ongoing, cyclical search for one’s place in the world—even when home feels fluid, uncertain, or unstable.

📆 Last year, on this day, events affecting South Korean 🇰🇷 workers and their families in Georgia brought renewed attention to the uncertainty that migration, work, separation, and sudden change can bring. We hold space for those affected and for their loved ones.

🔸May we honor the histories that shape us—and continue building communities where every person is treated with dignity and has the chance to find, and be welcomed, home. 🇰🇷

⬅️⬅️

#KoryoSaramArt #KoryoSaramAmericans #KoreanDiaspora #KoreanAmerican #DisplacementAndBelonging

“Deported Koryo Saram Koreans”
Author unknown

#CentralAsianKoreans #CentralAsianDiaspora #DiasporaStories #DiasporaVoices #MemoryAndBelonging taken in Massachusetts, United States by @yankirayan

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23 days ago

A slice of my art process for Homecoming — an ongoing series of rhinestone paintings I’ve been working on since 2025. Excited to show these pieces as part of the Emerging Artist Showcase!
On view at @nohocenterforthearts through August 22. by @yankirayan

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2 months ago

It’s a special place. Grateful to be here 🤍 by @yankirayan

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3 months ago

I’m here. by @yankirayan

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3 months ago

💖 by @yankirayan

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3 months ago

I’ve been so conflicted my relationship with social media for the past few years as it’s changed drastically just as much as the world around me 🥀but I’ve decided I wanna commit to share more about my journey as an artist, a human being, a woman, an experimenter.

I’ve been living in Northampton, MA for almost 2 years now and it’s my second time being a part of the group show with talented fellow artists in the caring space of @nohocenterforthearts. The works I’m exhibiting is a part of ongoing project/series that is deeply personal and rooted in my relationship to home, memory and belonging. I’ll be happy to see you there.
This Friday. April 10. 5-8 pm. by @yankirayan

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6 months ago

Strange Condition

Watercolor on paper
9 x 12 inch / 22.9 x30.5 cm
2025

#watercolorpainting #contemporyart #artworks #humancondition #visualartist by @yankirayan

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a year ago

Untitled (Anticipating disruption)

Watercolor on paper
11.7 x 16.5 inch
2024

It’s been a long journey to get back to experimenting and creating in a more vulnerable, at times more challenging way. Here to cherish all the rough edges, unlearning and intuition.

#watercolorpainting #contemporyart #liminality #artworks #contemporarydrawing #intuitiveart #visualartist by @yankirayan

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a year ago

The programme for @londonmigrationfilmfestival is finally live, and I’m incredibly excited to announce that I’ll be guest curating an event around Koryo-saram as part of it!

⏰ @ritzy_cinema, Sun 24th Nov, 15:30-18:00

The event will feature

📽 a screening of two films (Kim Soyoung’s ‘Heart of Snow: Afterlife’ alongside ‘Three Borders’ by @alisa.berger.mun, who’ll be attending the event in person, thanks to a bursary from @goetheinstitut_london),

🗣 an after-screening discussion with both filmmakers, as well as Koryo-saram advocates and creatives (@kira_blackberry in Boston, @bobs_photocards in Paderborn, and @shok0tort flying in all the way from San Francisco!), moderated by myself,

🎵 and a reception/listening event soundtracked by @ostinatorecords’s recent brilliant compilation Synthesizing The Silk Roads: Uzbek Disco, Tajik Folktronica, Uyghur Rock & Crimean Tatar Jazz From 1980s Soviet Central Asia, featuring, among others, ‘Remember Me (Pomni Menya)’ by the legendary Koryo-saram ensemble Ariran.

Learn more about the event from the carousel and grab your tix via the link in bio!

📸 credits: @alisa.berger.mun’s gorgeous family archive, more of which you’ll see in ‘Three Borders’. taken in Ritzy Cinema by @yankirayan

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2 years ago

new england by @yankirayan

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2 years ago

work in progress taken in Northampton, Massachusetts by @yankirayan

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2 years ago