NIKKI S. LEE: PROJECTS
Nikki S. Lee, Lesley A. Martin, Umbrage Editions [editor], Russell Ferguson [texts], and Gilbert Vicario mit der Künstlerin [essays]
Nikki S. Lee, Lesley A. Martin, Umbrage Editions [editor], Russell Ferguson [texts], and Gilbert Vicario mit der Künstlerin [essays]: NIKKI S. LEE: PROJECTS. Ostfildern-Ruit, Germany: Hatje Cantz Publishers, 2001. First edition. A very good hard cover book with glossy printed boards and no dust jacket as issued: minor shelf wear includes a bump on the top fore edge and creasing around the top of the spine. Interior unmarked and very clean. Out-of-print.
11.25 x 9.5 hard cover book with 112 pages and 90 color illustrations. From the publisher: "In her works, the Korean-born American concept artist Nikki S. Lee makes use of both documentary street photography and performance art: with an intriguing sense of perfection, she slips into the stereotypical images of rather different social or ethnic groups. In her first work of this kind, The Tourist Project, Nikki S. Lee presented herself as a camera-armed Japanese tourist on a sightseeing tour through New York. Other projects followed, and they are documented for the first time in this book: on seemingly simple 'snap shots', we see, for instance, a young Latina in a backyard of Brooklyn, a stripper in a bar, or an old woman bent by age. Nikki S. Lee succeeds in an almost uncanny way to carry her embodiments beyond masquerade and pastiche. With just a few pictures, she unerringly captures the salient features of a group and, for a moment, 'enters into' the role she has adopted. And so it is that in Nikki S. Lee's works social strata of every conceivable kind are played out and superimposed on her own features as though in a multiple exposure image."
“Nikki S. Lee: Projects, is part street photography, part performance art. In a series of extraordinary transformations, this young, Korean-born conceptual artist unfolds a multiplicity of lives and identities documented through the lens of her point-and- shoot camera as she becomes a young punk in the East Village, a Connecticut-based exotic dancer, or a senior citizen picking through thrift stores in Murray Hill. Nikki S. Lee is a Korean-born photographer currently based in New York City. Her work has been shown in museums and galleries worldwide, including the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, the Stephen Friedman Gallery London, and Gallery Gan, Tokyo.”