Exercise – Nikki S. Lee

Nikki S. Lee is a Korean photographer and filmmaker, living and working in Seoul, although formerly based in New York. Lee uses different artistic disciplines: Photography, performance, film and multimedia. She combines the different media to explore the different layers of information on which the identity question can be examined.

According to her own words, she likes to have many layers in her artwork and she makes a kind of art that seems very simple at first, but once you peel off the layers you find many stories inside of it. The more you think about it the harder it gets to interpret.

In her various projects, she transforms herself into different types of people: Drag Queen, Hispanic, Yuppie, Senior, Lesbian, Exotic Dancer, Skateboarder. For some of these projects she had to learn certain abilities (e.g. to dance, to ride a skateboard, etc..) to play the roles convincingly; and for the “Senior Project” she needed a professional makeup artist to characterize herself as an old person.

Lee believes that all people have fantasies about living other people lives ( I tend to agree on that). Lee says: “I am free. I can become anyone. Don’t ask me who I am”. Within this series of “Projects”, she does not appear to have any intention to make fun of these social groups. And she says she does not have any identity issue, although as a teenager she fantasized about being someone else. It would be deemed as such, however, when you look at it in relation to her other project she does appear to be more commenting on her own identity.

“Parts” is about taking photos with people that she had a close relationship with, and then she cut them out from the picture.

The idea of the “Layers” project is using drawing portraits of herself drawn by street painters in different cities of the world and putting three of them from the same city into a single image, to illustrate how people from different parts of the world portray her.

Although her work can look “amateurish” (in fact, the pictures are not taken for Lee, but for non-professional photographer friends/passers-by by), it has been carefully planned and executed. Using snapshot quality/style pictures make viewers believe that the pictures are “real”, and the method makes the subjects feel at ease in front of the camera.

Each project requires a three-month period preparation when she makes friends among the people of the group she wants to characterise herself as. She spends a lot of time getting to know the individuals in the group She has learned that each group has its own quirks and outlooks on life and there are similarities between all the groups

Through this process, she appears to have achieved a better understanding of herself. Playing other roles is a way to demonstrate to herself that she is able to do many things, that she perhaps would not have been able to do without hiding behind a masquerade.

References

YouTube. (2018). INNERview Ep65 Who Am I? The artist drawing attention in NY – Nikki S. Lee. [online] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMychWgKedA [Accessed 7 Oct. 2018].

YouTube. (2018). Photographer Nikki S. Lee Can Turn Into Anyone. [online] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oI8xpJItPVI [Accessed 7 Oct. 2018].

Tonkonow.com. (2018). Nikki S. Lee. [online] Available at: http://www.tonkonow.com/lee_projects_3.html [Accessed 7 Oct. 2018].