Nikki S. Lee

Lee grew up in South Korea and was surrounded by photographs through her father, who was a photographer, but she did not decide early on that she would become one herself. She studied photography at Chung-Ang University, moved to New York in 1994, encountered fashion at the Fashion Institute of Technology, and worked as an assistant to photographer David LaChapelle. In a 2025 Aperture interview, she recalled that she initially wanted to become a fashion photographer and that graduate study at NYU gave her distance from commercial production as she searched for her own form of work.^*22

Guggenheim teaching materials trace Lee's move from photographic study in Korea to New York and the emergence of Projects in 1997 while she was at NYU.^*21 The work centered less on technical polish than on the procedure of entering a real group and reaching the point at which she could be photographed as one of its members.

Lee later said that she was more interested in photographs that testify to a person's presence over time—funeral portraits, snapshots, and family albums—than in technical virtuosity or the production of a “beautiful image.” For Lee, who had initially wanted to work in film, photography was not a substitute for a long continuous narrative. A single photograph could preserve the relation between a person and a place, then later be received as something that looked like fact.^*11

By the late 1990s in New York, photography, performance, appropriation, and multiculturalism had opened broad challenges to fixed ideas of the self. Projects emerged in that environment, but its method extended beyond individual masquerade: Lee entered specific communities and incorporated the time of actually living alongside them into the production of the work.^*7

The Fukuoka Asian Art Museum's account of The Young Japanese Project (6) likewise describes recognition by the group and the act of being photographed within it as conditions of the work itself.^*6

Self-Portraits Made Within Social Groups

Western traditions of self-portraiture long assumed that artists presented their own appearance as a primary subject and largely defined the resulting image themselves. In contemporary photographic self-portraiture, that simple model of “photographing oneself” becomes less stable when another person operates the shutter or when the artist performs a role. Scholarship on Lee places Projects within this shift while emphasizing how she extends the relation between author and subject outward to the group and the viewer.^*9

Lee observed each group, learned its clothing, posture, speech, and behavior, joined its daily life for several weeks, and then appeared in photographs with actual members. U.S. Department of State material likewise describes this sequence of observation, participation, and photography as her working method.^*5 The work therefore depended on more than the accuracy of a disguise. It included whom she stood beside, how close she stood, and which situations allowed her to be treated as part of the group. Studies of Lee similarly discuss this extension of self-portraiture beyond the artist's body through the positions of artist, group, photographer, and viewer.^*9

The Evidentiary Look of the Snapshot

The ordinary snapshot format of Projects served a purpose beyond reducing technical complexity. Consistent with Lee's interest in photography as testimony, she asked friends, group members, and sometimes passersby to use automatic cameras, bringing the images close to family photographs and casual pictures among friends.^*11

Date stamps at the edge of the frame, slightly rough color, and off-center figures make the pictures look more like photographs made by someone who happened to be present than carefully composed art photographs. That ordinary appearance allowed Lee to use the unspoken credibility of vernacular photography—the assumption that if people appear together in a snapshot, they probably belong together—as material for the work.^*1

From Projects to Parts

Across The Ohio Project, The Hispanic Project, The Punk Project, and The Exotic Dancers Project, the same body looks different from group to group. Seen across the series, one person occupies several social roles. Zabludowicz Collection describes the snapshots as traces that blur the boundary between fact and fiction.^*8

Beginning in 2002, Parts cropped male partners out of the frame, leaving only an arm, leg, or other fragment of the body. An interview in Cahier de Séoul shows that Lee's concern with a self-image that changes with one's counterpart continued into these intimate relationships, where appearance and behavior were likewise responsive to another person.^*11

The National Museum of Women in the Arts also presents the movement from Projects to Parts as an inquiry into female self-image formed through relations with other people as much as clothing or the body. The self-portrait is therefore less concerned with revealing a “true face” than with the way the same person appears differently as partners or groups change.^*2

This development makes it difficult to treat Projects simply as a celebration of self-transformation or the freedom to become anyone one chooses. The photographed self takes shape through what surrounding people, intimate partners, and viewers perceive, and therefore cannot be fully possessed or controlled by the artist.^*10

The Ethics of Performing Race and Class

Lee's work has also drawn criticism for incorporating racial and ethnic signs into her own body. X-TRA's criticism addresses the appeal of the work while also asking who has the power to enter another group temporarily and then leave it.^*4

The historical significance of Projects therefore cannot be reduced to a celebration of fluid identity. Because the work depends on habits of classifying race, class, gender, and age through appearance, it retains both the capacity to expose those classifications and the risk of repeating them.^*20

The Yuppie Project was discussed early on as a work that reverses the habit of treating only ethnic minorities as “racialized groups,” showing that affluent white professionals also possess social codes legible through clothing, location, and bodily behavior. In a 2001 Art Journal essay, Maurice Berger treated the work through the problem of making “whiteness” visible and argued that Projects could not be explained solely as transformation into other cultures.^*24

The Ohio Project

In The Ohio Project (8), blond hair, clothing, posture, and even the physical distance between bodies indoors are adjusted to the snapshot conventions of a white Midwestern community. The work depends on Lee entering the photographic grammar shared by actual people; a generic “white appearance” alone would not produce the same social evidence. The Met likewise identifies the process of learning each group's style and behavior before being photographed as central to the series.^*1

A single image can look like an ordinary commemorative photograph. Placed beside other Projects, however, the same face repeatedly enters different versions of what looks “normal.” Clothing, posture, and distance within the group, which first seem natural, emerge as photographic forms learned within specific communities.^*19

The Hispanic Project and The Hip Hop Project

Princeton teaching materials use The Hispanic Project (1) to examine how ethnicity and social codes are recognized within photographs.^*3

Guggenheim's The Hip Hop Project (1) shows that the appearance of belonging is produced by more than clothing and pose; where a person stands within the group also matters.^*13

In The Yuppie Project, by contrast, some photographs do not look like fully successful assimilation. The individual Projects therefore form a comparative sequence that tests where social classification appears to work and where it begins to fray. They are not a catalog of successful transformations.^*14

a.k.a. Nikki S. Lee

In the 2006 video a.k.a. Nikki S. Lee, Lee performs different versions of “Nikki,” introducing fiction into a documentary format that would ordinarily promise access to the artist's authentic self. An e-flux screening record confirms that after moving from photography to video, the work continued to address the boundary between self-image and fiction.^*12

The method of asking others to press the shutter in Projects and the performance of “the artist herself” as another role in this video belong to the same inquiry. Both unsettle, through their form, the expectation that photography or film automatically guarantees the truth of a person.^*12

Comparing Sherman, Piper, and Antin

In Cindy Sherman's self-portraits, the artist transforms herself into figures that evoke film stills or art-historical types, placing established images of femininity and their conventions at the center of the frame. Lee also uses disguise, but in Projects the self-image is produced by entering real groups and appearing in group photographs made by other people. Performing an existing image alone would not account for this social dimension. Korean scholarship on self-portraiture likewise identifies this expanded structure—from artist alone to artist, group, and viewer—as an important difference between Lee and figures such as Sherman and Yasumasa Morimura.^*9

Adrian Piper's The Mythic Being placed her body in 1970s public space wearing a masculine Afro, mustache, and sunglasses, exposing the mechanisms through which strangers rapidly read race, gender, and class. Lee also works with classification through appearance, but she does not primarily create direct tension with viewers in public space. She participates in a community over time and leaves snapshots in which her belonging appears ordinary. Cherise Smith compares the two artists within the same study as practices of embodying the position of another.^*23

Eleanor Antin used works such as The King and The Ballerina to sustain fictional personae over time, testing from the 1970s onward how the self could resist fixation as a single identity. Lee's personae are not wholly fictional: they are assembled from the existing codes of punk, hip-hop, yuppie, and other communities. Her performance therefore carries the ethical problem of temporarily borrowing another culture. Smith places Antin, Piper, and Lee within the same history of “performing the other” in order to historicize both this shared method and its tensions.^*23

The particular force of Projects as self-portraiture therefore lies in more than Lee's ability to “become anyone.” Sherman worked through existing representations, Piper through social readings in public space, and Antin through sustained personae. Lee made participation in real groups and a third party's shutter conditions of the work. The image depends both on how the artist presents herself and on how other people treat her as a member of a particular group.^*9

Snapshots Enter the Museum

When Projects enters a museum as art, the snapshot's resemblance to a family photograph cannot be separated from the long procedure required to produce that resemblance. Lee joins a group, adjusts her appearance and behavior, asks a third party to take the picture, and finally selects the photographs. What institutions such as SFMOMA collect is therefore an image in which the structure of an “ordinary commemorative photograph” has been deliberately produced through this entire procedure, not merely a snapshot technique.^*16

Hundred Heroines Museum lists Lee's work in collections including MOCA Los Angeles, the Museum of Contemporary Photography, the Hirshhorn Museum, ICP, Guggenheim, and the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, indicating the extent to which Projects has circulated across regions and institutions.^*15

Reception and Criticism

Liverpool Biennial presented Lee as an artist who challenges fixed ideas of national and cultural identity.^*7

A French exhibition archive from 2003 preserves images from The Lesbian Project and The Ohio Project and discusses clothing, attitude, and behavior as signs of social belonging. It shows that Projects, begun in New York, was already being received outside the United States as work concerned with the visual codes that make a person appear to belong to a group.^*18

A 2000 Frieze review observed that the repeated appearance of the same person in photographs that initially look like ordinary snapshots exposes apparently natural scenes as constructed.^*17 The same mechanism also reveals how quickly viewers classify people through hairstyle, clothing, skin color, and place. Current assessments therefore need to address more than the skill of Lee's transformations: they also have to consider her ability to enter another culture temporarily and leave it after the photograph, as well as the contradiction that the work must mobilize stereotypes in order to make them visible.