First Edition, Hague Cantz, Germany, 2005

The Korean artist Nikki S. Lee became internationally known for snapshot-style photographs in which she assumes a wide variety of ethnic and cultural personas.

Lee always puts the viewer in a confrontative position with their own public personality, or what C. G. Jung would called the “persona”, the mask we wear in public in order to impose a certain image about us. The way the artist manages to make people doubt about subcultural aesthetics of any kind can be a very hard to swallow project for many. In this one, called “Parts”, Nikki S. Lee focuses her work on her own persona instead of other ones, presenting a serie of images where she is always the main character (and if she is not, the picture is cropped so she is the only person in it) creating a very wide range of identities associated to a same face, that suddenly change completely depending of different contexts and varied haircuts or outfits.

Courtesy of Agent Delamort