Nikki Lee’s The Young Japanese Project: Fabricating “Infantile Citizenship” and East Asian Identity

Abstract

Between 1997 and 2001, the New York-based South Korean conceptual photographer Nikki Lee conducted a series of performative, photographic Projects in which she dramatically altered her appearance through a blend of clothing, make-up, props, diet and tanning salons and infiltrated a range of American social and cultural groups, such as drag queens, strip dancers, yuppies, Japanese teenagers, Latinos, lesbians, black hip-hoppers, senior citizens and skateboarders. This paper focuses on The Young Japanese (East Village) Project (1997), which documents her temporary ‘passing’ into a New York-based youth group mainly constituted of second-generation immigrants and art school students of Japanese origin, playing with the western racist assumption of the physical and historical uniformity across all East Asian subjects. The community that Lee engaged with for a short period of time embraced the popular culture of ‘cuteness’ and created an outlandish, hand-craft fashion style, which draws to mind the youth street fashion movement during the 1990s at the Harajuku in Tokyo. Adapted to the soil of America, the Harajuku street fashion was used by these young Japanese expatriates as a naive, performative mechanism to construct and reconstruct individual identity and social collectivity. Their daily lives were staged as fashion tableaux of performance and costume change, demonstrating an escapist, symbolic mode of youth collectivity that negates adulthood and essentializes their cultural heritage. Grounded in the seemingly ‘cosmopolitan’ New York City, where both Koreans and Japanese were away from home, Lee’s ‘passing’ into the community was based on not an intricate, interactive relation between two Asian cultures, but on the easily purchased subcultural performativity and collectivity via costuming and makeup. Lee’s practice, I would suggest, raises questions about transnational cultural (mis)translation, articulating a contrived group identity, extricated from the conflictual social and political reality that immigrants and foreign residents usually experience. This paper draws on Lauren Berlant’s conception of ‘infantile citizenship’—an idealized, egalitarian image of American life constituted of fetueses, children and immigrants, which aims at fabricating a post-historical, post-racial future-oriented democratization. This paper examines how Lee’s photographic project provides a critical insight into the notion of citizenship and social belonging under the democratic ideal of ‘Americanisation’, reconsidering the formation of East Asian identity and ‘home’ in the situation of migration and diaspora.