In Cathy Covell Waegner’s “Performing Postmodernist Passing”, the photographer Nikki S. Lee is highlighted as an example of ‘passing’ in visual media. By ‘passing’, Waegner means the ability of an individual to appear as a different race and integrate into that particular racial society. Waegner focuses on one work in particular, in which the Asian American Lee passes and poses as a black woman. Lee has other works in this series which Waegner does not discuss, but which I think are notable: she poses as a white woman in front of a confederate flag, a female stripper, a lesbian, an old white woman, a Hispanic woman, and a few others.
In her work, Nikki S. Lee truly exemplifies what Waegner explains as “polyculture”. Lee’s ability to change from one race to another so easily demonstrates that “the stereotypes used to determine socioethnic groups are encoded and foregrounded” (Waegner 225). The idea of separate and distinct ethnicities is inherent in multiculturalism, while polyculture suggests the porousness of ethnicity. As Lee demonstrates, the aesthetic (what someone looks like, where they are, how they dress, how they act) as interpreted by the viewer determines race.