Michael Workman

Taken individually, South Korea-born photographer Nikki S. Lee's self-portraits make clear statements as to what socioeconomic class she belongs to, what particular lifestyle qualities she prefers to emulate. In her Fujiflex print "The Punk Project (5)" from 1997, she sits in a bar wearing a studded leather jacket, neck collar fixed with metal rings and sheer black top over a blazing crimson brassiere, sporting a bad red dyejob with the roots already grown out. She's the stereotype of any East Village punker, an image any viewer could be forgiven mistaking for documentary--until that is, you move to the next.

Maybe that next image comes from her "Yuppie Project" series or "The Lesbian Project," or any of the variety of images in which Lee appears alternatively as somebody else you think you recognize. She easily crosses subcultural borders, whether as Ohio trailer trash in midriff and platinum blonde hair, mounted on the lap of a shotgun-wielding, thickly bearded back-woodsman with a Confederate flag on the wall in her 1999 "The Ohio Project," wearing knee socks and preening with her teenage friends in her 2000 "The Schoolgirls Project" or as a Latina masher in tightly penned lipstick, hair greased and curled in her 1998 "The Hispanic Project." Either way, it's a jarring juxtaposition that immediately alerts the viewer that Lee's never the person we encounter her as, but a mimic adept at confronting us with the aggregate signs and symbols we freely associate with those particular cultural groups she chooses to infiltrate. In "The Tourist Project," Lee even transforms herself into a stereotype of herself as cultural tourist in white sweat socks and dark sunglasses, camera slung across her chest. Lee's impersonations get at a pervasive phenomenon of modern life: how everyday, people everywhere step into identities that are professional rather than personal. It's a well-known fact that lawyers act as representatives of their legal practices, doctors of their hospitals, journalists (and--ahem--art critics) of the newspapers and magazines for which they write. Different rules apply than if they were acting for purely personal reasons: there are histories involved, traditions and standards of conduct that remain at best a mystery and at worst misperceived by those outside their professions.

But Lee's images transpose this professional cultural phenomenon as a unique framework for investigating personality, as a doorway into the concern with how we identify our modern selves as individuals and members of a larger society. We are, in part, how we dress, what ethnic group we belong to, what we smoke, where we go for nightlife. Her photographs are marvelous, as is much of the work now on display as part of the newest exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Photography, "Manufactured Self." Another Korea-born photographer, Jung Yeondoo, takes a similar approach to Lee in his thirty-four portraits of middle-class families living in a Seoul apartment building called Evergreen Tower. All the rooms are architecturally the same, even down to the placement of the light fixtures on the ceiling. Surprisingly, there's not much resistance to the conformity suggested by the uniformity of their living spaces, with the difference between each family portrait a matter of mere pose, suggesting an eerie satisfaction with their mediocre stations in life. His "Bewitched" series (taken from the popular television series of the same name), however, reveals the inner turmoil of such stoic subjects manifested as escapist fantasies. Shown in a dual-slide projection, one side shows the subjects as they really are, for instance, as a young gas-station attendant, fuel pump in hand; in the other, he is shown as he fantasizes himself: a trophy-winning Formula One racer, rained with winner's-circle confetti.

Wishful thinking plays a large part as well in Chicago photographer Brian Ulrich's inkjet prints of people in the act of shopping as the artist's way of investigating to what extent we are dictated our identities as "targets of marketing and advertising." In his 2004 "Indianapolis, IN," for example, a man is shown testing out a Tempur-Pedic mattress at the mall while his daughter looks on, wife rubbing her shoulder blades with an oversized electric massager. On the nightstand beside the man, a doctor appears on the screen of a small TV extolling the product's virtues as medical fact: expect only the best "sleep quality" from a Tempur-Pedic mattress!

Nothing in this show quite compares, however, with the honest ambiguity of self-perception that viewers confront in Martin Parr's "Sign of the Times: A Portrait of the Nation's Tastes." It's a devastating series. Throughout the early 1990's, Parr visited nearly 2000 homes across the continent with a crew from the BBC headed by Nicholas Barker, the self-described "bad boy of English documentary." Barker interviewed owners about their tastes in interior décor, while Parr photographed them as a kind of collective portrait of the national identity. As one subject, whose house is described as "depicted by a portrait of a Labrador sitting near a classical white fireplace with a gold electric fire insert" explained it, "I think we are looking for a look that is established, warm, comfortable, traditional." Interestingly, their home portrait could as easily be seen as conveying the exact opposite of these qualities: defeated, cold and hopelessly desolate.

"Manufactured Self" shows at the Museum of Contemporary Photography, 600 South Michigan Avenue, (312)663-5554, through March 4.

(2005-02-01)

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