Origins & Practice

Symbols of System Failure

The world is a system of systems.

Symbols of System Failure (SoSF) is an ongoing artistic project by Donald Lee, comprising an expanding vocabulary of independently invented abstract symbols. Each symbol is constructed from lines, writable as script, and assigned a specific meaning. Unlike his purely asemic Drawing Script characters, SoSF symbols are created to express particular ideas, events, and conditions.

The origins of the project can be traced to the Russia–Ukraine war, when Lee first began making abstract symbols with assigned meanings in response to the conflict. At that time, the project had not yet been named.

Soon after October 7, 2023, Lee resumed making these symbols in response to the unfolding events in Gaza. Reading accounts of human suffering and encountering disturbing photographs and videos shared on Instagram, he felt compelled to respond through his art. He began inventing symbols addressing cruelty, destruction, grief, injustice, and the failure of human systems. He shared these works on Instagram under the description Art Against Genocide. Over time, the project acquired the name Symbols of System Failure.

For Lee, the making of these symbols is also a process of catharsis, externalization, and sublimation. Just as crying allows overwhelming sadness to find expression, inventing, writing, drawing, and painting the symbols provide an outlet for grief, anger, and helplessness that might otherwise remain trapped within. Through the act of making, these internal emotions are externalized, finding visible and tangible form in lines, gestures, and abstract constructions. At the same time, the creative process becomes a form of sublimation, transforming difficult emotional energy into acts of artistic invention and expression.

The process does not necessarily relieve the sadness or anger, nor does it resolve the suffering that prompted it. Instead, it provides a way to respond, to give form to what is felt, and to transform emotional distress into creative activity.

The symbols are therefore both expressions of personal emotion and acts of bearing witness. Rather than reproducing the images and incidents that prompted them, Lee invents abstract forms through which he can respond to what he has seen and learned.

Black Paintings

In Black Paintings, individual SoSF symbols become the subjects of paintings in their own right. Rendered in acrylic on small wood panels, the symbols emerge through strong contrasts of black and light, with visible brushwork and variations in the painted surfaces.

Although each symbol carries an assigned meaning, the painting is not merely an illustration of that meaning. The lines, shapes, spaces, and physical gestures of painting give the invented symbol a visual presence of its own.

Written on His Face

In Written on His Face, Lee introduces SoSF symbols into portraits of public figures. Drawn in oil pastel, the symbols are superimposed upon faces, partially concealing their identities while bringing attention to the actions, events, or conditions the symbols represent.

The familiar function of portraiture — to reveal the identity of an individual through facial likeness — is interrupted. The symbol becomes another means of describing the person, suggesting that what is written on a face may reveal something that facial appearance alone cannot.

Thirteen drawings from the series were exhibited in 2024 at Robert Kananaj Gallery, with three additional drawings completed subsequently.

Together, Black Paintings and Written on His Face offer two ways of bringing the symbols into visual existence: one presents the symbol as an independent abstract form; the other places it in direct relationship with a human face. Both arise from the same impulse to respond, through art-making, to suffering and failures within the world we share.