GIRL WITH MANY SELVES.

AKA NIKKI S. LEE

BY NIKKI S. LEE

60 MINUTES, 2006

Like another case of art imitating life imitating popular stereotypes, a trope that defines much of Nikki S. Lee's work thus far, this fashionably mutating artist was among the crowd, but incognito, for the regional premiere of her first film, AKA Nikki S. Lee. Her black shag and sober clothing marked her as an understudied but hip grad student from the nearby university, so when she rose from the row behind us, much of the audience laughed. Once more, Lee confirmed that context and costume determine not only how we read an image, but also how we read real life.

In her introduction, Lee appropriately acknowledged that "what's a reality and what's not a reality" is no longer a distinction worth discerning. As her cinematic foray into the elusive boundaries between fashion's fictions and fact further proposes, we are always metamorphosing, dressing, and performing with the gaze or expectations of another in mind, and in turn, make presumptions on the same. Her sardonic detachment from herself as a subject, perhaps unexpected given her body's central role in her work, was manifest when the slide projector would not advance. After about four minutes, Lee looked up at the maroon-toned work by Mark Rothko on the screen and deadpanned, "So, this is Nikki ... as a painting."

The hour-long film, shot on digital video in 2004 and 2005, is simultaneously "a fake documentary of a real artist" and "a real documentary of a fake artist" that follows the "days in the many lives" of Lee, whose first well-known photographic images, the "Projects" series (1997-2001), continued the artistic experiments with the transformed-self begun by female artists in the 1970s. By adopting the head-to-toe style of subcultures like "Skaters," "Yuppies," or "Homegirls," Lee fluidly morphed into a variety of visual stereotypes--a dreadlocked, West Coast skater girl or a sallow-skinned, magenta-haired East Village punk as only two of her myriad mutations. Viewed as a whole, "Projects" proffered a visual paradigm of a post-identity politics, post-MTV generation weaned as much on fashion's global marketplace as on its media. Now, Lee suggested, identities are simply fleeting allegiances, shopped and slipped into as much as they are formed by one's experiences.

Indeed, in AKA Nikki S. Lee, Lee seems determined to prove that there is no overt emotional, social, or political investment in such guises, and correct the misconception that identity is fixed or stable. By creating "a Nikki Lee based on what people think Nikki Lee would be like," she insinuates that every identity, whether individual or group, eastern or western, Korean or American, is always contextual. Her multiple personas imply that we are all "girl(s) with many selves," depending on who and what surrounds us. Whether she portrays herself as a reclusive bibliophile in spectacles, a formally coiffed bride from the boroughs, or a jet-setting artiste with paparazzi-avoiding shades, Lee seamlessly melds with the mise-en-scene, which in turn helps the viewer flesh out the intentionally banal dialogue.

Epitomizing Roland Barthes's prescient definition of a fashionable woman, Lee never appears destabilized by this consistent engagement with la mode's masquerades. Rather, they become her second skins. As she states in one scene, "I cannot be totally natural and be myself." The viewer watches Lee preen as a couture-clad "Asian doll" in Paris, mix with sycophantic collectors in Manhattan, and forlornly stroll the streets of Frankfurt, but never grasps hold of the "real" Nikki. In essence, so little of revelatory importance happens that one is forced to fill in the ellipses with the visual details that Lee artfully styles. It is arranging the artifice of fashion's trappings, quite precisely, that is her art, and no less powerful for being so. As Barthes affirms in The Fashion System (1967): "[La Mode] ne supprime pas le sens; elle le montre du doit" (Fashion does not suppress meaning; it points to it with its finger).

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Although Lee frequently references Barthes, another iconoclastic Frenchman may provide a better filmic analogy. Like the most disquieting meditations in recent work by Jean-Luc Godard, Lee's most profound insights regarding the contemporary condition are evoked by ostensibly insignificant props. In one collector's home, hundreds of two-dimensional artworks lay stacked against one another, their economic and artistic value so clearly inconsequential that her young son is allowed to put Post-it notes on them to demarcate his preferences. In another, it is bridal gowns--billowing and opulent--that reveal the staggering, new-millennium excess of both money and goods in the Long Island suburbs. The last appears during a lengthy tracking shot that follows Lee, the supposed star of this film, at a crowded photography fair in New York City. Passing by hundreds of booths representing other photographers, her petite figure becomes nearly invisible. As the viewer realizes that no one is paying any attention to Lee, the ingenious inclusion of a Chanel Egoiste perfume advertisement in the frame is another reminder that she does not take her art world celebrity or her "self" too seriously. Like the Nikki in her early photographs, in real life she's just another face in the crowd.

ALISIA G. CHASE, PhD, is an assistant professor in the art department at the State University of New York at Brockport.