Nikki S. Lee

Lee's most noted work, Projects (1997–2001), began as a graduation requirement. Photographs were of herself with many groups of people such as drag queens, punks, swing dancers, senior citizens, Latinos, hip-hop musicians and fans, skateboarders, lesbians, young urban professionals, and schoolgirls. With a simple point-and-shoot camera, she asked others to record her.[7] She immersed herself into each American subculture and created a new self-identity. Lee devised her work about investigating notions of identity and the uses of vernacular photography rather than creating beautiful pictures.[8] Lee would select a subculture, research it, and adopt the clothing, customs, and mannerisms of the group to fully integrate herself with the culture. She would try out many culturally diverse types of makeup, hairstyles, dyeing salon, multicolor contact lenses, and dance exercises. After three or more months of developing the identity, Lee would ask a person to take a picture of her with the group.[9] The use of the automatic camera provided Lee with a red timestamp, capturing that moment the person took a picture.[10]

While Lee's projects appear completely unique from one another, there is a common thread among all of the subcultures she portrays. One such is that each of the groups she chose to create an identity has a distinctive look that functions as a connection between the members of their community. Lee's projects highlight her underlying concept of how other people make her a certain kind of person and the influence of inner relationships on the idea of identity.[11]

Lee continues to question the concepts of identity and social behavior; she believes that 'essentially life itself is a performance. When we change our clothes to alter our appearance, the real action is the transformation of our way of expression- the outward expression of our psyche.' [12] Lee claims that when she shows her work, she prefers presenting a number of photographs together since they are all connected. The projects support and define one another. Lee's ultimate goal is for the audience to make up their own story when they see her work.

To many, The Yuppie Project (1998) is the most significant of Lee's series. Lee immerses herself in the world of Wall Street professionals and whiteness as a race. The Yuppie Project highlights how white people rarely acknowledge the intricate subcultures of their own race by focusing on documenting a small minority of influential men in business settings. Whiteness is represented in two ways; one being the affluence of these young business men and the other being the exclusivity and alienation. In a couple of months of this project, Lee adopts the appearance, body language, and speech pattern of the subcultures to document them in her photographs. Unlike other projects of the series in which Lee is almost indistinguishable from her new clique, Lee stands out in the photographs of The Yuppy Project.[13]

A more recent series by Lee, Parts (2002–2005), uses images of Lee posing in different settings with a male partner, cropped to make it impossible to directly see who she is with,[7][8] leaving only a trace of the man, such as an arm or a foot. This picture sets the focus completely on Lee, which suggests that her identity also changes after each emotional relationship. Lee states that after each photo, her companions state that she looks different then what they thought. With this project, Lee demonstrates the development of an identity that grows and mutates based on the unknown identity of the companion. Parts portray how one of Lee's persona diverges on where she is, how she acts, and how her own identity conforms around the identity of her partner.

In 2006, Lee released the film, A.K.A. Nikki S. Lee. The project, described as a "conceptual documentary", alternates segments presenting Lee as two distinct personalities, one a reserved academic and another an outgoing socialite. It had its premiere at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, October 5–7, 2006.[9] The film appears to be a true Nikki documentary, a young woman who is serious about making a second documentary about herself. Nikki No. 2, an impulsive personality, flaunts in the photo. Lee explained in an interview, "Nikki number one should be Nikki, and Nikki number two should be fake. But both are Nikki fake."[11] Through this work, she aims to point out the interesting concept of showing reality and non-reality at the same time.

During her career, Lee's only work for a commercial magazine was with Black Book. Lee collaborated with the magazine on the theme of Bourgeois which featured photographs of herself and her companion as a bourgeois couple.[14]

One of her most recent works is Layers (2008), which is a series of photographs that show layers of the portraits she collected from 14 different cities. Lee would requests street artists to draw her portrait in which she would layer them together underneath a lightbox and take a photo of the mix. The purpose of this project was to find out how people from different cities and ethnicity would view her and describe her features. With this project, Lee asserts that everyone has complex, multilayered personalities, in which any small parts can be viewed by others of different ethnicity.[13]