Nikki S. Lee Projects - Review

Afterimage, Sept, 2001 by Joan Kee

Photographs by Nikki S. Lee

(Ostfildern-Ruit, Germany: Hatje Cantz, 2001)

This first monograph on the works of New York-based photographer Nikki S. Lee, whose snapshot portrayals featuring herself as a member of various groups ranging from that of East Village punk to the denizens of rural Ohio trailer parks were featured in a recent exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, center upon issues of identity and the multiplicity of the individual self. Containing all of Lee's portraits, or projects," the monograph includes an essay by UCLA's Hammer Museum curator Russell Ferguson and an interview with Lee by ICA curator Gilbert Vicario. Ferguson's essay, which compares Lee's works to other photographers dealing with related issues of identity such as Cindy Sherman and Tseng Kwong Chi, tends to frame Lee's photographs as a visual depiction of the ways in which an individual may be articulated in various and often conflicting ways. His comparative approach along with his attempt to place Lee's works in a more art historical context provides a welcome contrast to previou s critical responses that tended to reduce the works to illustrations of cultural difference or as evidence of the artist's ability to "decipher" cultural codes in the role of the consummate cultural tourist. Especially refreshing about Ferguson's approach is his avoidance of a fixation on the artists-Korean ethnicity, which in previous writings had the problematic effect of positioning Lee as the odd-man-out vis-a-vis her subjects. Yet despite his focus upon Lee's explorations of self and the subsequent interview by Vicario that confirms many of his assertions, the photographs themselves suggest a different concern that appears more firmly grounded in the artist's own fascination with distance and proximity. The projects depicted show Lee as a participant in the various demographic categories that she is familiar with as a resident of Seoul and New York--the uniformed schoolgirl, the yuppie, the lesbian--but they also suggest a certain kind of distance or a sense of detachment from these settings since she a ppears as a caricature of the very groups she depicts. In one shot from The Ohio Project, for example, Lee, who sports a bleached-blonde wig, is perched on the knee of a shotgun-toting man in a room whose primary adornment is the Confederate flag. Many of her snapshots note that one can approximate, even over-replicate, appearance but never quite reach complete assimilation with, and into an original.

Lee's exaggerated masquerade thus draws attention to the fact that our perception of certain static categories is only an aggregate of cues and clues drawn largely from our own environments, rather than an accurate facsimile of the so-called "real thing." The artist might look like the proverbial tourist from Asia in The Tourist Project, but her tube socks and sneakers are purely derived from the mid-western visitors so ubiquitous in Times Square. Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of this monograph is that as a cumulative body of work, Lee's projects delineate the ruptured spaces between the actual and the approximate that, in turn, undermine our concepts of what certain "fixed" categories might actually encompass.

At Full Speed: Hong Kong Cinema in a Borderless World, edited by Esther C. M. Yau. University of Minnesota Press/272 pp./$49.95 (hb), $19.95 (sb). Dandelion Room, by Thomas Struth. D.A.P./168 pp./$45.00 (hb).

Death's Showcase: The Power of Image in Contemporary Democracy, by Ariella Azoulay. The MIT Press/144 pp./$55.00 (hb).

Digital Desires: Language, Identity and New Technologies, edited by Cutting Edge The Women's Research Group. I.B. Tauris/249 pp./price unavailable (sb). Distance and Proximity, by Thomas A. Clark. Pocketbooks (Canongate Venture [5]), New St., Edinburgh, EH8 8BH)/122 pp./price unavailable (sb). Directed by Allen Smithee, edited by Jeremy Braddock and Stephen Hock. University of Minnesota Press/312 pp./$18.95 (sb).