According to Berger, there is something different about Nikki Lee’s Yuppie Project that makes it stand out apart from her others, and he attributes this to whiteness. He says that this whiteness causes her to never “quite fit into the yuppie milieu” and that her face registers “the unmistakable signs of sorrow and even despair.” I don’t know about or have seen all of her photos before, but I know that I can recall an equal look of sorrow in some of her other images. The thing that confuses me is whether or not Berger is discussing whiteness because she seems uncomfortable and doesn’t blend in with her project as well as her others, or simply because of the fact that she is surrounded by mostly white people. I attempted to find a photo of her during the schoolgirls project wherein she may have a look of sorrow on her face, but failed. I also attempted to find one with the hip hop project, to try and counteract the idea that it was necessarily whiteness that caused her discomfort, but of the photos that are online, she seems comfortable and upbeat. Thinking back to then the images I remember of her looking sorrowful or dejected, they do involve projects that consist dominantly of white people. So maybe Berger made a good observation in saying that she is unable to hide her own sense of discomfort with whiteness, and therefore it seems to make her Yuppie Project more personal in a sense. It comes off a little bit though as an attempt to find the “real” Nikki Lee within her artwork, which is one of the topics we’ve discussed recently in the class. Is it really her own discomfort with being an Asian woman that is shining through remarkably enough to make it distinguishable? or is her body language carefully crafted so as to make a more obvious statement about whiteness? Both are most likely true, but it seems to me that a large force behind her work is the playfulness with the fact that no image of her reveals anything true or “real.” I am then more inclined to pursue my latter question, which is a better basis for the article, and probably the main one after all. I still find it curious though as to the inclusion of the idea of a “visceral discomfort” that is uncontrollable or planned. I also don’t feel that the photos of her schoolgirl project wherein she’s smiling and energized represent a visceral comfort. She picks projects for the reason that it’s a challenge for her to become a part of them, and I think she’s playing more into a cultural stereotype of different social groups than representing her own feelings towards them. The stereotype for a yuppie for me does involve a sense of sorrow and emptiness, regardless of race, so it makes sense to me that she would have a look of dejection, or even despair. As with this photo of the schoolgirl project, my stereotype includes smiling and bubbliness. I wish that I could understand what it’s like to be of a race other than white, and awareness of one’s own race might exist within every single person who is not white, so it is possible that it’s impossible for Nikki Lee to erase it from her face.