A Passage to the Undercommons: Virtual Formation of Identity in Nikki S. Lee’s Self-Transformative Performance

Abstract

A Passage to the UndercommonsVirtual Formation of Identity in Nikki S. Lee’s Self-Transformative Performance Hyun Joo Lee (bio) Hostage, host, guest, ghost, holy ghost, and Geist. —Jacques Derrida, Aporias What the beyond of teaching is really about is not finishing oneself, not passing, not completing; it’s about allowing subjectivity to be unlawfully overcome by others, a radical passion and passivity such that one becomes unfit for subjection, because one does not possess the kind of agency that can hold the regulatory forces of subjecthood, and one cannot initiate the auto-interpellative torque that biopower subjection requires and rewards. —Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons From 1997 to 2001, New York-based performance artist Nikki S. Lee produced a series of photographic works titled Projects, in which individual photos were thematically grouped into fourteen different American cultures and subcultures. In each photo, Lee poses as a member of a different cultural group—sometimes as, say, a punk rocker or a yuppie, other times as an elderly woman or a young Latina—by adopting the groups’ characteristic hairstyles, facial expressions, codes of dress, and gestures.1 The other members of the group appearing in the photographs with her are often looking straight into the camera in the midst of leisure activities. Produced by an automatic camera with a built-in flash, each photo is inscribed with a red time stamp and printed without a slick finish, which seems to claim this as a record of “what actually happened.” At first glance Lee’s Projects appears to be comprised of ordinary snapshots, but once we realize that the artist has placed herself in every photograph, we begin to question the seeming ordinariness of these images because they present us with [End Page 72] something beyond a simple combination of visual clichés and a performing body. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Nikki S. Lee, The Punk Project (1), 1997, C-print. © Nikki S. Lee, courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York. Born in South Korea, Lee moved to New York City in 1994 to study photography and made her debut on the U.S. art scene in 1997 with her Projects series (Ferguson, 17).2 The questions the series raises about the body’s capabilities cut right to the heart of the debates on postidentity rhetoric and its critiques, which were prevalent in the American art world at that time (Jones 2012, 117–69). Not surprisingly, Lee’s repeated self-transformations have provoked a wide range of responses. In particular, critics interested in Lee’s Projects are drawn to the photos’ tendency to disclose something about the viewers themselves. Art historian Mark Godfrey, for example, sees Lee’s photos as “great satires” (109). Photographer Danny Lyon feels that her performance reflects “the America that is real, and the America that some people hate, and want to stop at any cost from contaminating their world because it is so strong and so appealing” (8). Others have argued that the series speaks especially to diasporas. The critic Kyung-Sik Suh, for example, points out that while Lee asserts her ability to become whomever she wants, the photos “seem to indicate that, no matter how competently the artist plays different identities in her photographs, she [End Page 73] cannot get rid of the trace of her birth—her Asian appearance” (103, my translation). Suh, himself a member of the Korean diaspora living in Japan, addresses the very condition of diasporas that constantly raises the question, “Who am I?” Other reviews of the Projects are thoughtful but somewhat less favorable. Jack Halberstam argues that by gaining access to commonplace communities and copying them, Lee’s work is suggestive of the violence of photography (2013, 96). With regard to Lee’s embodiments of different subcultural groups, art historian Miwon Kwon contends that the series “reduces the crisis of identity to a game of costume changes . . . and . . . ultimately refuses the other” (85, emphasis in original). The concerns expressed by Halberstam and Kwon seem to derive from the idea that, because Lee embodies styles and cultural codes that other people may claim as their own, her snapshots create an internal logic...