TOKI and Shifting Identity
The birth of TOKI
Hye Rim Lee’s TOKI is a twenty-first-century creation. TOKI was conceived in 2001 and revealed in 2002 in at the Moving Image Centre in Auckland. Her debut form, in Lee’s final year of art school, was in a video installation as a computer-manipulated character of a human actor costumed in a bunny-eared headdress. The following year she reappeared in a series of nine digital prints for at Auckland’s Starkwhite. A riff on Botticelli’s , the nine head-shot portraits of TOKI are perhaps her real debut as a fully digital entity. In Lee’s words, the portraits suggest ‘9 traits of personality, or 9 stages of the conception of birth. Through the process of rendering 9 times, she reveals herself with 9 different faces. She is multi-dimensional and able to shift from being cute to feminine, sexual, angelic or evil.’ Formally and conceptually, she is a reproducible, hybridised and shifting vehicle reflecting aspects of ‘sexuality, fantasy, female desire and femininity in relation to media and contemporary pop culture, cyber culture, computer games and Korean animamix mixed with Western ideals of beauty and body TOKI’s name is Korean for rabbit, which connects her to the playboy bunny and the sexual connotations of rabbits as representative of instinctive and uninhibited sexuality while also being docile. In Korea, the rabbit is also associated with the moon and thus the menstrual cycle, the lunar cycle and feminine energy. TOKI’s identity is founded on characteristics of the hyper-idealised and hyper-sexualised figure and what she is seen to represent as she toes the blurry line between objectified and empowered. These aspects set the conceptual background of TOKI’s character narrative which continues to develop 20 years on.
