Nikki S Lee and Lyle Ashton Harris

Nikki S Lee

Born 1970, Lee is a Korean photographer and filmmaker formerly based in New York City, now living and working in Seoul.


Projects, 1997–2001
Lee's most noted work, Projects (1997–2001), begun while still in school, depicts her in snapshot photographs, in which she poses with various ethnic and social groups, including drag queens, punks, swing dancers, senior citizens, Latinos, hip-hop musicians and fans, skateboarders, lesbians, young urban professionals, and Korean schoolgirls. Lee conceives of her work as less about creating beautiful pictures, and more about investigating notions of identity and the uses of vernacular photography. Lee has stated that the project was one of her graduation requirements.
In 1999 Lee's first solo exhibition took place at Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects, New York which was her exclusive representative from 1998 to 2007.

2002–present
A more recent series by Lee, entitled Parts (2002–2005) features images of Lee posing in different settings with a male partner, cropped to make it impossible to directly see who she is with.

In 2006 Lee released a film, A.K.A. Nikki S. Lee. The project, described as a "conceptual documentary," alternates segments presenting Lee as two distinct personalities, a reserved academic and an outgoing socialite. It had its premier at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, October 5–7, 2006.

Lee has had solo exhibitions of her work at major international institutions including the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City. Her works are in the collections of major museums, including the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Milwaukee Art Museum; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum in Fukuoka, Japan; and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.
Writing on Lee's work have appeared in many magazines, newspapers, and journals including Artforum, Art in America, Art Journal, and the New York Times. Two monographs on Lee's work have been published: Nikki S. Lee: Parts. by RoseLee Goldberg and Nikki S. Lee: Projects. essays by Russell Ferguson and Gilbert Vicario .

Faking Identities

Crunch time has come to snap out of my post-graduate daze and choose a topic for my all-encompassing, grand sweeping finale Masters Project (no pressure). Last Summer I spent countless late stuffy nights in John Rylands Manchester Library, incessantly analysing the gigantic, grotesque, aged, wrinkled and hairy body parts of self-portrait photographer John Coplans for my undergraduate dissertation in Art History. I’m not complaining too much as Coplans is a unique and characteristic photographer and his reluctantly compelling images got me a good grade in the end (whilst my friends and flat mates slaved over papers on Fungi or Thermodynamics). However, this year I’ve decided to think carefully about a unique and exciting project which preferably avoids looking at old men’s wrinkly balls.

Raised in ‘the ghetto’ that is Wolverhampton (I’m actually from a nice suburban area but like to sound streetwise) I’ve moved to Manchester and now London which has given me the chance to meet and mingle with a variety of social groups, each with distinctive identities. The one which fascinates me most is the ‘chav‘ community in Wolverhampton. Contrast chavs with the ‘hipsters‘ in East London, the ‘toffs‘ from Chelsea, the retro ‘ravers‘ of Manchester and the freshly graduated ‘Yuppie bankers‘ in their swanky city centre apartments. My experience of different social communities fragments into a series of clearly distinguished social identities.

Chav

Sociology, the context of people and the politics of identity are all concepts which interest me and I’m yet to open up Pierre Bourdieu and deeply indulge in the theory behind the likes of ‘cultural capital’ and ‘habitus’. Therefore, after much deliberation I’ve decided to soon perform some kind of ethnographical experiment regarding these different social identities as part of my final Major project. I want to learn more about how and why these cultural groups form. Can everyone be categorised? Do we choose to belong? And most interestingly…How easy is it to become someone else?

The Korean born and New York based artist, Nikki S. Lee.


The Hispanic Project (25), 1998.



In her series of photographs Projects, Nikki S. Lee transformed her own identity through a blend of clothes, make-up, tanning salons, diets and sheer determination to fit into cultural groups from the Punks, Tourists, Lesbians, Hispanics, Yuppies, Seniors, Skateboarders and Schoolgirls. Like the tropical Chameleon, Lee has camouflaged herself into the environment of specific social groups, changing her outward identity to blend in with surroundings. She has infiltrated each group over a period of time, adopting their mannerisms and gestures to ultimately document her new look with a snapshot camera, taken by a friend or total stranger. Through the snapshot aesthetic complete with a date stamp in the corner of the image, her photographs are intrinsically ‘raw’ carrying an artlessness which registers as authentic and ‘real’ for the viewers.


The Hiphop Project (1), 2001.

Lee introduces herself as an artist and explains the nature of her project to each group but it seems this fact is quickly pushed aside as she is casually accepted due to her fake persona. The seniors simply refuse to believe that she is actually a young woman in disguise, dismissing her story as early senility! (Cantz, 2001: 13).


The Seniors Project (26), 1999.

To an unaware viewer, Lee becomes invisible in each image (like the Chameleon of the trees), finally recognisable only by her Korean ethnicity. Her images speak to people’s fantasies about wanting to become something else, wanting to live other lives and wanting to embody something they’re not.


The Yuppies Project (15), 1998.

Via the photographic medium, Lee demonstrates how easy it is to fake an identity and perform a variety of lifestyles.


The Lesbian Project (14), 1997.

 Nothing is certain except that nothing is certain.

Chav

Hispanic

Grannies

Hip Hop

Lyle Ashton Harris

Born in the Bronx, Harris was raised between New York City and Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania. He graduated with a BA from Wesleyan University and received his MFA from the California Institute of the Arts.

In January of 1993, "Face: Lyle Ashton Harris" was exhibited at the New Museum. The installation combined photography, video and an audio track offering a critique of masculinity and explore constructions of sexuality, race, and gender.In 1994, Harris exhibited The Good Life in New York. The show was composed of large format Polaroids depicting staged and impromptu photographs of friends and family members. One of the most notable works from the show is a triptych series in collaboration with his brother, Thomas Allen Harris, entitled "Brotherhood, Crossroads, Etcetera". The work weaves a complex visual allegory that invokes ancient African cosmologies, Judeo-Christian myths, and taboo public and private desires.

Collage has remained an integral part of Harris's studio practice since the mid-1990s. In 1996, "The Watering Hole", a photomontage series, reveals his performative use of photography and its mechanisms, putting image into a field of representation where they reveal hidden or repressed occurrences.

In 2004, "Blow Up", Harris's first public wall collage was shown at the Rhona Hoffman gallery in Chicago. This led to a series of three other wall collages composed of materials, photographs and ephemera Harris collected including, Blow UP IV (Sevilla) which was made for the Bienal de Arte Contemporeano de Sevilla in Seville, Spain in 2006.

In 2010 Gregory R. Miller & Co. published Excessive Exposure. The publication is the most definitive documentation of Harris' "Chocolate-Colored" portraits made with a large-format Polaroid camera over the past ten years. In 2011, the Studio Museum in Harlem exhibited some of these portraits, highlighting specific individual subjects.

Lyle Ashton Harris is represented by CRG Gallery in New York City. He currently divides his time between his home and studio in New York and Accra, Ghana.