BROOKLYN, NY — A Space Gallery is pleased to present 100 Days of Alphabet, a solo exhibition by interdisciplinary artist Doah Lee, on view June 26 through 28, 2026. The exhibition offers a rare, three-day viewing of Lee's decade-long drawing project (2020– 2029), which visualizes the psychological and physical labor of immigrant assimilation through endurance performance and conceptual drawing.
Lee's system draws from two parallel structures of transformation and evaluation: 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. Beginning on the Lunar New Year of 2020, Lee produces three drawings per day across 100- day cycles: Part 1. Alphabet (upper case to lower case to phonetic symbols); 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.
Shortly after the project began, the artist found herself amid the surge of anti-Asian violence that accompanied the COVID-19 pandemic. Now, within a renewed anti-immigration political climate, Lee presents the midpoint of this decade-long evolution with renewed urgency.
The exhibition features five large-scale, 60 by 60-inch framed grids, each composed of 100 daily drawings per part. On the left wall, the 2020 triptych presents three systems: the repetition of the Alphabet, the raw anger of the Hate Alphabet, and the corrective censorship of the Asterisk Alphabet. On the opposite wall, works from 2023 and 2025 reveal structural shifts in the project. The word "HATE" has been erased — first transformed into a Void Alphabet (2023), then into a complete void (2025).
Each drawing is signed in the format YYYY.MM.DD according to the Korean Lunar Calendar. Though the date may appear to align with the Gregorian calendar, it marks a different temporal reality — a subtle displacement that challenges viewers' assumptions about standardized global time and exposes how systems shape perception.
100 Days of Alphabet is not a narrative of empowerment, nor a story of finding one's voice. It is a rigorous, unsentimental documentation of erosion — an act of subtractive labor examining how language, time, and identity are disciplined under systems of power.
