Nikki S. Lee

Nikki S. Lee was born Lee Seung-Hee in 1970 in the small town of Kye-chang, South Korea. She studied photography at Chung-Ang University in Seoul before moving to New York in 1994 to attend the Fashion Institute of Technology, followed by graduate studies at New York University. It was in New York — that great laboratory of identity, where millions of people construct and perform versions of themselves every day — that Lee conceived the project that would make her one of the most discussed artists of her generation.

The Projects series, begun in 1997 and continuing through 2001, constituted Lee's breakthrough work. The concept was deceptively simple: Lee would choose a social group — punks, hip-hop fans, senior citizens, Wall Street yuppies, Hispanic families, lesbians, swing dancers, drag queens, tourists, skateboarders — and immerse herself in their world for weeks or months at a time. She would alter her appearance through clothing, makeup, hairstyle, body language, and demeanour until she was accepted as a member of the group. Then she would have someone within the community — never a professional photographer — take a snapshot of her among her new companions, using the casual, unstudied aesthetic of the amateur photograph.

The resulting images are simultaneously hilarious and unsettling. In The Hispanic Project, Lee appears as a young Latina woman at a family barbecue, her skin darkened, her hair teased into an appropriate style, her body language perfectly adapted to her surroundings. In The Seniors Project, she transforms herself into an elderly woman, her face aged with prosthetics, her posture bent, sitting among genuine senior citizens in a park. In The Yuppie Project, she becomes a polished young professional at a cocktail party. Each transformation is both convincing and transparently artificial — the viewer knows that the Korean woman in the snapshot is performing, and yet the performance is so committed that it raises profound questions about the nature of identity itself.

Lee's work operates at the intersection of several important artistic traditions. It draws on the conceptual photography of Cindy Sherman, who similarly uses self-transformation to explore the construction of female identity, but Lee's approach is fundamentally different. Where Sherman works in a studio, constructing fictional characters through costume and lighting, Lee inserts herself into real communities and real social situations. The photographs are not staged; they document actual encounters between a performer and an unwitting audience. This element of genuine social interaction gives Lee's work an ethnographic dimension that Sherman's lacks, and raises ethical questions about appropriation, deception, and the politics of passing.

The Projects series also engages with questions of race, ethnicity, and cultural belonging that are central to the immigrant experience in America. As a Korean woman who can, through costume and behaviour, convincingly present herself as Hispanic, African-American, or white, Lee exposes the degree to which racial and ethnic identity is performed rather than innate. Her ability to cross boundaries that are typically assumed to be fixed and impermeable challenges essentialist notions of identity and suggests that belonging is less a matter of biology than of shared codes, gestures, and appearances.

Following the Projects series, Lee produced Parts, a series of photographs that took a radically different approach to questions of identity and relationship. Each image showed Lee with a male companion — a boyfriend, a date, a partner — but the photograph was physically cut so that only Lee and a fragment of the man remained visible. The severed images, with their jagged edges and absent partners, spoke to the instability of romantic relationships and the way identity is shaped by the presence and absence of others. The Parts series was widely exhibited and cemented Lee's reputation as a conceptual artist of remarkable sophistication.

Lee's subsequent projects, including Layers and her film work, have continued to explore themes of identity, performance, and the construction of the self through social interaction. She has exhibited at major institutions worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the International Center of Photography, and numerous galleries in Asia and Europe. Her work has been collected by major museums and has generated an extensive body of critical writing that engages with questions of postmodernism, multiculturalism, and the politics of representation.