For ‘Flash Art’ magazine

Last summer, Lee was sponsored by the Bronx Museum to create work now on show at “One Planet Under a Groove”, an exhibition examining the connections between art and Hip Hop. Her trademark way of working is to radically transform her physical appearance in order to look like a member of various communities, including punks, skaters, senior citizens, and yuppies. She researches each group extensively and learns the skills necessary to fit in, in one case getting sponsorship to cover a gym membership to tone her body, and at another time, spending weeks in Riverside Park learning to skateboard. In the Hip Hop project, Lee closely imitated styles of dress, makeup and hair popular in the Hip Hop community and spent hours in a tanning salon to darken her skin. In the resulting photographs, Lee works the dance floor, pouts at the camera and just hangs out with a crowd that includes music producers and graffiti artists.

Although she studied and practiced commercial photography for the better part of a decade, Lee adopts a hands off approach to the camera. Instead, she asks friends and onlookers to take snapshots of her as she hangs out with her crowd. In the same way that she relinquishes control of the camera, she embarks on her performance projects uncertain of the outcome. In last year’s Exotic Dancers project, in which Lee applied for and got a job as a topless dancer in a nightclub in suburban Connecticut, she worked in platform shoes, garters and not much else. Before this, she created the Lesbian project, in which she is seen sharing intimate kisses with an accommodating blond. In both projects, Lee left her comfort zones far behind, taking risks that give her work strength as performance art.

On a superficial level, Nikki Lee seems to be acting out the American immigrant experience – trying on different aspects of the new culture to see what she’ll take or leave. The fact that she emigrated to the U.S. from Korea only seven years ago makes it all the more surprising that she has been able to master the details of so many subcultures in so short a time. But her forays into individual and group identity are even more profound considering Korea’s conflicts over national identity in the last century. A divided country, recovery from the attempted annihilation of the Korean culture and language by Japanese colonialists, and rapid urbanization and industrialization have put ‘traditional’ Korean folk culture in sharp contrast to modern city life. Anti-American sentiment at home, particularly with regard to U.S. military forces in Korea, makes the position of a Korean immigrant in the U.S. all the more meaningful.

Although fractured identity is fundamental in Lee’s photographs, Leslie Tonkonow points out that, “…One thing people misunderstand about Nikki’s work is that even though it touches on issues of multiculturalism, cultural identity and cultural politics in the United States, this is not really her issue…She is approaching these series very much as someone who is Asian and who has an Asian perspective on the individual in the group…” Lee has made it clear that she is focusing on the way in which any individual will define him or her self in relation to a group while contrasting the pursuit of individual identity in the West with the Asian orientation towards group identity. In an interview earlier this year, she told ICA Boston assistant curator Gilbert Vicario, “…In my work, I take pictures with a group and with other people of the group. So I describe like-people and their cultures, and then it goes back to my identity: I describe myself.”

Lee foregrounds the question of her identity by making artwork which resists a story line. Usually, her pictures look like she is just ‘hanging out’ on a normal day with her normal friends. Often compared to Cindy Sherman or Nan Goldin, Lee denies that either artist has substantially influenced her. She tells Vicario that her work is, “…not about Nan Goldin’s work, you know, going from bathroom to bedroom. Go to your house and look at your snapshot album. You don’t have pictures of sex scenes. Most people only have snapshots when they go traveling.”

Her extreme travels into foreign cultural and racial territory have produced images of subtle incongruity. In gesture, makeup and clothing she plays her parts perfectly, but her Asian features give her away every time, resulting in an initially confused reading. With an ‘anything is possible in New York’ attitude, it is feasible that a young, Asian-American woman might be a swinger, yuppie, lesbian or punk. But it is when she steps across racial barriers that questions of identity and not just subcultures come to the fore, and she creates her strongest work.

Because there is little suggestion of narrative in her photos of group life, the work has the feel of documentary. However, Lee subverts the expectation that the ‘reality’ of each group will be faithfully captured by the camera by the simple fact of her presence in each shot. Like the current trend for ‘reality’ programming on TV, the audience knows that the situations are heavily manipulated and the actions of the characters are influenced by their setting. Lee engages the demand for manipulated reality with work that revels in the contradictions of the global culture. By suggesting that Western viewers consider themselves as part of communities, not total free agents, the artist proposes an alternative way of conceptualizing life and community. She also offers an antidote to the isolation of modern, urban culture.

for Centro de Arte de Salamanca, Spain.

“Experiencing nature was not enough, so we sought to understand it. Understanding nature was not enough, so we seek to control it. Controlling nature was not enough so we seek to enhance it. Enhancing nature was not enough, so we seek to reproduce it. Reproducing nature is not enough, so we seek to replace it. These are all human pursuits, but it’s only through digitization that we are able, now, to take them to their ultimate conclusion.”
Richard DeGrandpre

“Simply put, the inhabited grid has become the irreducible sign of the world we live in today.”
Dan Cameron

Below his seat, the ground begins to tremble. A roar fills his ears and suddenly, he is pinned to his seat as the aircraft gains momentum and lifts into the air. Cruising at altitude, the plane tilts to the right and left, making minor course adjustments as tiny earth whizzes by in a blur below. Torben Giehler’s landscapes are a view from the cockpit. High above the ground, civilization turns into a patchwork of color featuring an occasional boxy piece of architecture or globe-topped communications tower. In the distance, mountain ranges come into view, their craggy peaks still too far away to awe us with their scale. Each painting is a challenge to the gravity that keeps us tethered to earth and the limitations of our physical bodies. Like flight simulation computer games, they fulfill a simultaneous fantasy of escape from and dominance over the landscape. But their effect is physical, and viewers are propelled forward into Giehler’s brave new world.

It’s unclear how high above the planet we are in these paintings, but one thing is certain – there are no ant-like people or tiny farmhouses visible at this altitude. In ‘Circling Overland’ (2002), the plane flies over a landscape dominated by a white grid and swoops down to the left so that the horizon nearly disappears into a wedge at the top of the canvas. The painting shares a title with a song by the Belgian electro-music band Front 242, which describes a midnight surveillance flight over Western Europe. The year is 2029 and intelligent robots do the bidding of their military commanders by monitoring the activities of humans below them. Two paintings with a similar composition, ‘Bad redandblue’ (2002), and ‘Night Train’ (2002), feature layers of blue and purple sky hovering over an ominous, blood red horizon. Suddenly, we’re in the future, we’re being watched, and we don’t know what’s coming next.

Not all of these flights are night missions, however. One of Giehler’s trademarks is his use of bright colors that neutralize the darker edge of the digitally enhanced world he depicts. ‘Ziplock’ (2002), for example, is a spaghetti junction of thick, overlapping lines in orange, green and white. As if Barnett Newman’s famous ‘zips’ have gathered for a party, the grid has loosened up and lines overlap at random. ‘Push’ (2003) is a crazy quilt of distorted rectangles each pulling down toward the bottom left of the canvas. Although it has spatial distortions similar to Giehler’s aerial views, there is no horizon and the sunny yellows, peppy oranges and pinks, and mellow blues and greens are the subject of the painting. The pattern resembles the patchwork of colors that underlies the white grid in ‘Circling Overland,’ suggesting that this painting is a partial view of the larger piece. ‘Ziplock,’ may look like a busy junction, but it also resembles fibers under a microscope, magnified to reveal the component parts of a larger structure. If ‘Circling’ is an aerial overview from a surveillance flight, ‘Ziplock’ and ‘Push’ are the data gathered, snapshots taken by a zoom lens.

Whether the perspective is micro or macro, Giehler’s pixilated aesthetic is familiar to anyone who has used a CAD program, played a combat video game, seen flight simulation or watched a manga cartoon character fly through a futuristic city. Computer mediated reality and virtual reality, less common in painting, permeates daily life. The ubiquitous grids that lie over the surface of the earth in the paintings are a visible manifestation of the ever-expanding web of human communication accessible through the Internet, e-mail, cell phones, satellite beams and TV signals. So while Giehler might, through Front 242’s lyrics, envision a futuristic race of free thinking machines serving man as they cruise the airspace, his paintings are resolutely set in the present. Hidden communications networks are made visible, but these webs exist now and deny his work the designation ‘futuristic.’

During the last century, artists were no strangers to scientific progress, sometimes adapting the latest findings in their artwork. The Impressionists’ daubs of paint and the Cubists’ fractured picture planes occurred in tandem with scientific advances in understanding the structure of reality. But while the Futurists, for example, were in awe of the material world, others like Kandinsky and Mondrian investigated a way to communicate the unseen, spiritual structures that they felt dominated life. By elaborating these hidden relationships in line and color, Mondrian set a precedent for artists like Giehler, who depict the invisible, wireless world. Mondrian’s unfinished, final painting, ‘Victory Boogie Woogie,’ (1944) is a tribute to his intoxication by the energy of wartime New York, and his continuing meditation on the meaning embedded in his grids. Giehler quotes Mondrian in his own ‘Boogie Woogie’ (1999) and a similar piece titled ‘Yeah, Yeah, Yeah’ (2002). Each is a painting within a painting – a close-up on the surface of a gridded canvas. Like Mondian’s, Giehler’s lines resemble a circuit board, broken up by squares of color that give the composition the energy of a dance step and the speed of a microprocessor.

Circuit boards, microprocessors and the Internet may be the innovations of the present day, but they’re also the platform for tomorrow’s advanced technology. Giehler references both present and future in every image. With one foot in fact and one foot in science fiction, the artist reminds us that the difference between reality and virtual reality is sometimes one of perspective. By painting specific places, like ‘Lhotse’ (2002) and ‘K2-North Spur’ (2002), Giehler counters the anonymity of his other landscapes. Titled or not, the mountain paintings suggest real places, whether they are laid over with a patchwork of light and shade, as in ‘Untitled’ (2002) or bask in the setting sun, as in ‘Untitled (Brown)’ (2002). Side by side on the wall, mountains and vast planes push and pull the viewer between the present and the future, the real and the virtual. But what is specific to the mountain pictures and particularly the Himalayas, are their identity as a final frontier for adventurers who pit their strength and wits against Nature. They symbolize the last remaining real life challenge to human dominance of the planet.

As our communities become increasingly virtual, when we can shop, pay bills and do our banking on line and then take a break to converse in chat rooms or e-mail a friend, convenience increases alongside impersonality. The premise for Giehler’s paintings, visions from the air, posits the lone individual against the masses below. The pilot whose viewpoint we share has broken free from his fellows and speeds through the atmosphere alone, a free agent. Below him, the grid remains in force, but unable to extend its grip to his freewheeling ship. Inevitably, the pilot must sooner or later return to his rightful place and whatever mediated version of reality he inhabits. As he descends back into the colorful architecture of the ‘Downtown’ series (2001), he resumes his participation in the dream that is progress, still a citizen of a cyberspace that is, “…a conscious reflection of the deepest desires, aspirations, experiential yearning and spiritual Angst of Western man.”