Parts.

Photographs by Nikki S. Lee. Essay by Rose Lee Goldberg.

Hatje Cantz, Ostfildern, 2006. 96 pp., 60 color illustrations, 9x11".

Korean-born, New York-based conceptual artist Nikki S. Lee once hoped to be an actress. Now she examines the construction and interpretation of identity in works that combine performance and photography. Her acclaimed Projects document her transformation (sometimes drastic) and assimilation into a wide range of subcultures and social and ethnic groups—from sophisticated ladies of the finest Parisian circles to white trash in American trailer parks, a hip-hop crowd, punks, lesbians, swingers and, appropriately, tourists. In Parts, she departs from those snapshots of cultural identity—for which she has since become internationally known—to explore the ways more intimate relationships affect who we are. As ever, Lee appears in each photograph, and each is shot by someone else. Now, however, rather than revising her persona to fit into an existing crowd, she changes over and over to match single characters, guys, who are then partially sliced out of the image, as if after a breakup. These halved images clearly and disturbingly point out the empty spots, the striking dependencies and the ways that we all—women particularly—define ourselves through our partners.
Nikki S. Lee has firmly established herself within the photographic pantheon, and is deserving your attention. Somewhere between an emerging and mid-career artist, her work is playful yet sophisticated and very distinctive. She has said, “We all have many different personas and I want people to think about the range that they occupy. There is a persona you present to a schoolteacher or to your parents or to a new boyfriend. Each is affected by the context and each shows a gap between inside and outside. Each is a personal performance.” Lee is explicitly the subject of her photographs. Influenced by her own relationships, she leads a fictitious life in Parts—as a woman whose character has, in many ways, been influenced by the company she keeps. With each image a new story unfolds. In Projects, published in 2001 and now out-of-print, she lived a transient photographic reality—acting like an anthropologist using participant-observation to study different “cultural” groups. This same ease of identity transformation is evident in Parts, but the scenarios are more personal. It is easy to project many of one’s own personas into Lee’s photographs. Many of us don various hats throughout the day—at work, at home, with friends. But Lee pushes that idea further. Look at your own collection of family snapshots through the years and note how your persona and identity has been transformed by the influence of friends and relationships throughout different chapters of your life. Where would I be now had I married the man I dated before I met my husband? I would be somewhat the same, but in many ways a different person living life on a different path. Nikki S. Lee moves from one path to the next seamlessly in the fictitious photographic world she has created. She is a photographic cosmopolite, composed of elements from all of her photographs while being none of them at the same time. It’s clear that we’ll be referencing Lee as the influence of many photographers to come. LARISSA LECLAIR

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