The Hip Hop Project (2), Nikki S. Lee

Artwork Overview

Nikki S. Lee, The Hip Hop Project (2)
Nikki S. Lee, The Hip Hop Project (2)
Nikki S. Lee
The Hip Hop Project (2)
2001
The Hip Hop Project (2), 2001
Where object was made: New York, New York, United States
Material/technique: silver-dye bleach print (Ilfochrome™)
Dimensions:
Image Dimensions Height/Width (Height x Width): 40 x 59.7 cm
Image Dimensions Height/Width (Height x Width): 15 3/4 x 23 1/2 in
Frame Dimensions (Height x Width x Depth): 22 x 28 3/4 x 1 1/2 in
Weight (Weight): 8 lbs
Credit line: Museum purchase: R. Charles and Mary Margaret Clevenger Fund
Accession number: 2002.0119
Not on display
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Label texts

Exhibition Label: “Embodiment,” Nov-2005, Kate Meyer Korean-born performance artist Nikki Lee investigates the markers and meaning of identity by infiltrating various American sub-cultures. Lee mimics the mannerisms and appearances of each group, spends time with its members, and then documents her experience by occasionally handing her camera to others in order to capture impromptu portraits.

Resources

Audio

Didactic – Art Minute
Didactic – Art Minute
Episode 191 May-2009 I’m David Cateforis with another Art Minute from the Spencer Museum of Art. Born in South Korea in 1970, Seung Hee Lee moved to New York in 1994 and changed her name to Nikki S. Lee as one way of adapting to her new Western lifestyle. Three years later, Lee began to make art based on assuming various lifestyles. For her Projects series, Lee carefully studied various subcultures and then transformed herself, both physically and mentally, in order to infiltrate them. Over the course of five years, Lee metamorphosed from punk to yuppie to exotic dancer to Japanese school girl and many other roles, all documented through color photographs taken with her snapshot camera by other members of the community. In the The Hip Hop Project (2), a 2001 photograph in the Spencer collection, Lee appears as an urban African-American, her skin dyed and hair braided into cornrows, staring defiantly at the camera, flanked by two young black men. Lee’s fascinating Projects convey a postmodern sense of identity as mutable rather than fixed, and her view that “essentially, life itself is a performance.” From the Spencer Museum of Art, I’m David Cateforis.