From June 26 to June 28, 2026, A Space Gallery presents a rare, three-day viewing of Doah Lee’s 100 Days of Alphabet, a 10-year drawing project (2020–2029) visualizing the psychological and physical labor of immigrant assimilation.
Operating at the intersection of endurance performance and conceptual art, Lee’s decade-long system draws from both the Korean Dangun myth—in which a bear endures 100 days in a dark cave to become human—and the pressures of standardized grading systems.
Inspired by these parallel structures of transformation and evaluation, Lee began the project in 2020 on the Lunar New Year, producing three drawings per day: Part 1. Alphabet (upper case to lower case to phonetic symbols, sustained across 100 days); Part 2. Hate Alphabet; and Part 3. Asterisk Alphabet.
Each drawing begins identically: Lee covers a 6×6-inch sheet of paper in dense 4B graphite, then draws a “children’s landscape”—a Western archetype of a house with a chimney and flowers, absorbed through early art education. She then uses an eraser to excavate language from the surface. Through the foundational tools of education—pencil and eraser—Lee examines the colonial legacy and power structures embedded in language. The eraser becomes an instrument for visualizing erased histories.
The premise of your show 100 Days of Alphabet is a culmination of rigorous act of obsessive, diligent labor over 10 years. What is the purpose of your labor and what are its fruits?
One of the reasons I started this project was a direct observation: the way immigrants are treated often depends on the accent they carry—not simply whether they have an accent, but which kind. A European accent reads differently than an Asian or African accent within American social and professional spaces. That hierarchy is not incidental; it reflects deeper assumptions about which languages and bodies are perceived as belonging and which are not.
Growing up in South Korea, learning English was compulsory from elementary through high school—over a decade of formal study. Yet after moving to the United States, the language still felt foreign. I realized that learning English was not only about communication, but also about learning social codes, expectations, and ways of being understood. Much of that labor is repetitive and invisible. The gap between years of study and the persistent feeling of being an outsider became the starting point for the project.
I decided to commit to ten years of daily work beginning on Lunar New Year in 2020, mirroring the length of English education I had received. I thought: perhaps after ten years of making the alphabet every day, something might shift—perhaps I would finally feel a sense of completion or belonging. I was curious, in a way similar to the Dangun myth, about what might exist on the other side of endurance.
The number 100 also carries an educational logic—100 points, 100 percent, mastery, completion. I wanted to use that structure not to affirm achievement, but to question what “completeness” means within systems that define belonging and evaluation.
When I began, I did not fully know what the work would become. It was a promise to myself: to show up every day and sit with uncertainty. Then, a few months later, the pandemic began, followed by a rise in anti-Asian violence. The project shifted. What had been a personal inquiry into language and education became a record of survival and a way of bearing witness to forms of labor and visibility shaped by crisis.
Each drawing begins with a surface fully covered in graphite and then moves through subtraction, as language is erased from within it. This reversal is important: meaning is not added onto a blank surface but uncovered from something already dense and accumulated. The process mirrors assimilation—not as linear acquisition, but as a constant negotiation between what is taken in, what is translated, and what is lost.
The fruits of this labor are not resolutions or answers. Rather, the project has become an ongoing archive of reflection. Looking across years, I can see how my relationship to language, anger, identity, and belonging has shifted over time. The work documents process rather than destination.
In relation to the Dangun myth, are you trying to metamorphosize into something different by doing this 100-day action, like the bear that becomes human? If so, what are you wanting to become by the end of the process?
The Dangun myth was an important starting point for this project. What interested me was not simply transformation into something else, but the structure of transformation itself. The bear is given conditions: it must remain in a cave for 100 days, avoid sunlight, and survive on garlic. There is a system, a rule-based endurance that promises change.
I was drawn to the uncertainty of that structure. I imagined the bear experiencing doubt, frustration, and curiosity. I wanted to bring that same logic into my own practice: if I commit to a system long enough, what happens? What do I become? Would I achieve mastery, belonging, or something else entirely?
As an immigrant, I recognize how many systems operate through a similar logic of conditional transformation. Learning language, adapting to cultural codes, and navigating institutions often carry the implicit promise that if one works hard enough, one will eventually belong. Yet that belonging is always conditional. It must be continuously proven through tests, paperwork, and evaluation.
Over time, I have become less interested in transformation itself and more interested in endurance. The work does not lead to a final identity. Instead, it documents an ongoing negotiation between selfhood and systems that define it. I remain within that process, and I do not know whether there is a final form at the end.
Your drawings share formal and conceptual qualities with Tony Lewis’s Abstract Slavery work: raw graphite marks, language, visible traces of process, and an emphasis on repetition and exertion. Lewis’s work is deeply engaged with histories of slavery, erasure, and suggests a comment about Black artists working extra-hard to find their place within the contemporary art world. Do you see any points of connection between your practice and his? Where do your practices diverge? What comment are you making on the acclimatization of Asian people into American, or Western society? More broadly, which artists have influenced your work and in what ways?
I can see formal points of connection between my work and Tony Lewis’s practice in the use of graphite, repetition, language, and the visible traces of labor. We both use mark-making, erasure, and accumulation to reveal how systems of language and structure shape perception, identity, and belonging.
At the same time, Tony Lewis’s work is grounded in the histories of slavery, anti-Blackness, and the structures that shape Black life in America. My work emerges from different conditions—immigration, language acquisition, cultural translation, and assimilation. While there may be formal similarities, the historical and political frameworks are distinct, and I am cautious about drawing direct equivalences.
What I think we may share is an interest in how systems of power leave traces on the body, language, and everyday life—and how those pressures become visible through repetition and labor. However, the specificity of each context matters. Conflating them risks flattening distinct histories.
In my work, I am not making a universal statement about Asian Americans or immigrants. I am working through my own experience of moving between linguistic, educational, and bureaucratic systems that reward adaptation while often obscuring what is lost in the process. Assimilation is frequently framed as progress, but I am more interested in its ambiguities: what is preserved, what is transformed, and what must be erased in order to become legible.
This interest is connected to time-based practices. I have been influenced by artists such as On Kawara and Tehching Hsieh. Their work helped me understand art not as discrete objects, but as sustained processes of repetition and duration.
On Kawara’s systematic documentation of time and use of standardized date formats made me reflect on how something that appears neutral—like a calendar system—is culturally constructed. In my own project, working with Lunar New Year timing made me aware of how writing dates (year/month/day versus month/day/year) is learned rather than universal, and how shifting between systems produces subtle disorientation.
Similarly, Tehching Hsieh’s endurance works demonstrate how repetition and duration function as both material and subject. The body becomes the site where time is accumulated and made visible. I am also interested in how both artists construct self-imposed systems that frame long durations as a way of making time legible through lived experience.
Together, these influences help me think about my practice as a negotiation between systems—linguistic, cultural, and temporal—and how those systems shape what can be seen and understood.
In speaking about your childhood education, you’ve described a gap between what you wanted to draw and what you were taught to draw, for example, wanting to depict the sky and clouds as you saw them, while being taught a more schematic visual language of a “bubble cloud.” Did you enjoy preschool? What do you think of the education systems in which you grew up? Does this tension between desire and skill inform your work today? Are you interested in frustration, limitation, or incompleteness of skill as artistic subjects? To what extent is the retention of a childlike visual language a deliberate choice, and what possibilities does it offer that mastery of a skill, like a realistic painting approach of clouds, would not?
I enjoyed drawing as a child and was often more interested in observing than following instruction. One memory that stayed with me is wanting to draw clouds as I actually saw them, while being taught a simplified symbol that represented “clouds” in general. At the time, I did not have the technical means to draw what I observed, but I was already aware of a gap between perception and instruction.
This led to early questions about perception itself: whether what I see corresponds to what others see, and how visual understanding is shaped through shared systems. Comparing the sky to the “bubble cloud” I was taught, I began to wonder where those forms come from and why they are used to represent reality.
I do not see this as a failure of education. Educational systems rely on simplification in order to create shared understanding. Symbols and conventions allow communication, but they also shape what we come to recognize as real.
This tension continues to inform my work. The childlike imagery in my drawings—the house, chimney, flowers, schematic landscapes—draws from early visual learning. It is not about innocence or lack of skill, but about how deeply these simplified systems structure perception.
These images often appear neutral, but they carry assumptions about domesticity, culture, and belonging. I use them to question how visual conventions become naturalized over time.
I am not interested in retaining a childlike visual language due to limitation. Rather, I am interested in how simplified forms reveal the systems that construct perception. A realistic image directs attention to an object; a schematic symbol directs attention to the idea of the object—and to the system that taught us to see it that way.
My work operates in this space: not representation of things as they appear, but examination of the systems that make them visible.
You, too, are an educator. What is important for you to pass onto your students?
The most important thing I try to pass on to students is questioning—developing a practice that remains open and willing to challenge assumptions, including those embedded in their training. Technical skills matter, but they are not the endpoint.
I also encourage students to understand systems such as perspective as constructed rather than universal. They are useful tools, but they reflect specific cultural histories. Recognizing multiple ways of organizing and representing the world expands what is possible in their work.
At the same time, I emphasize process and labor. I try to make visible how meaning develops through repetition, time, and accumulation—not only through final outcomes.
Repetition has historically been associated with both learning and discipline as well as punishment. How do these associations operate in your work? Do ideas of punishment, Sisyphean repetition, or torture hold any personal significance for you? Is there beauty or a feeling in awe or transcendence that you experience when you create your drawings? If not, what does recreating torture serve? Which feelings do you connect to when you create art, and why? What do you want your audience to experience?
When I began this 10-year, 100-day-per-year practice in 2020, it started with enthusiasm and curiosity, and during the pandemic it became a form of structure and survival. Over time, it became more demanding—something closer to a self-imposed discipline. That shift from enthusiasm to burden is now part of the work itself.
Repetition is connected to learning, discipline, and endurance. I am cautious about framing it as punishment or torture, because repetition is also fundamental to language learning, skill development, and adaptation. What interests me is how repetition makes visible the slow accumulation of labor and meaning.
There is a Sisyphean dimension to the work, but I think of it less as futility than as continued commitment with awareness. The difficulty is not denied; it is part of the structure.
My experience of making the work shifts between concentration, frustration, and moments of quiet clarity when small variations emerge within a rigid system. I would describe these as forms of attention rather than transcendence.
What I hope the audience experiences is not awe, but a slower and more attentive way of looking—an awareness that each drawing is built from repeated labor, and that repetition is not only an artistic method but also a structure that shapes everyday life, especially for those who must continuously adapt and perform belonging.
What is the connection between “raw anger”, hate, assimilation, phonetic alphabet and your actions of erasure and excavation?
When I began this project, it was structured around three systems: Alphabet, Hate Alphabet, and Asterisk Alphabet. Each represents a different register of language, assimilation, and emotional response.
The Alphabet traces language acquisition, moving from uppercase to lowercase letters and phonetic symbols. These phonetic symbols reflect the labor of learning pronunciation—how to shape the body to produce acceptable speech within another language system.
The Hate Alphabet emerged from a different condition. The repetition of “HATE” was not symbolic, but a way of giving form to an emotional and social reality that could not be expressed through neutral language. It created a structure for anger to exist over time.
The Asterisk Alphabet functions as a third register. The asterisk marks omission, correction, or censorship—it signals something present but partially suppressed. It reflects how expression is edited in order to become socially legible.
Across all three systems, erasure and excavation are central. Each drawing begins as a surface fully covered in graphite, including childhood landscape imagery, and language is revealed through erasure rather than inscription. Meaning is not added to a blank surface but uncovered from something already dense and accumulated.
This process mirrors assimilation—not linear acquisition, but a constant negotiation between what is taken in, what is translated, and what is erased. Even the “white” spaces retain traces of history and labor; nothing is fully neutral.
Over time, the structure shifted. “HATE” gradually disappeared—first dissolving into abstraction, and eventually becoming absent. This disappearance is not resolution. The emotional intensity did not vanish, but became embedded in structure rather than surface. The work reflects how sustained emotional and political experience is not resolved, but redistributed over time.
100 Days of Alphabet runs from June 26 – 28 at A Space Gallery, 13 Grattan St., Suite 402, Brooklyn, NY, with an opening reception on June 26 from 6:00 – 8:00 pm and an artist talk from 6:30 – 7:00 pm
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