Alaya offers a feast where vision and sound intertwine, each serving as a metaphor and a source of inspiration for the other.
——Keyi Zhang
Composition 1004
Keyi Zhang: In your practice, how do music, graphic design, materials, and spatial thinking influence each other?
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Alaya Lee: In many of the branding projects I do, as well as the works where I combine graphic design with music (such as poster design or surface planning), I see them as a kind of language translation. The relationship between music and design is like switching from one language to another—except instead of shifting from English to Chinese, it’s a translation from the visual to the auditory.
This mode of expression—from the inside out—also comes from my sensitivity to music and my material experiments in graphic design. Music holds both improvisation and order, and I try to express that balance between structure and spontaneity in my work.
So when it came to presenting the final work, I chose to use space, materials, and structure together, as a way to allow the audience to interact with the piece more intuitively. That was the intention behind that part of the project.
Composition 1004
Keyi Zhang: How did your thesis project Composition 1004 evolve from music into a spatial installation? Could you walk us through it?
Alaya Lee: Of course! The materials I chose originate from one of the first songs I ever wrote—a very rough piece, never polished, never finished, and never publicly performed. As a designer, I feel deeply connected to music, but I never made it my primary practice, so music has always felt a bit “awkward” for me. In my final year, I wanted to build a bridge between music and design through my practice at SAIC.
I originally worked a lot with book forms—artist book structures—but soon realized that the structural nature of music (its fixed song forms, for instance) couldn’t be fully broken apart, while improvisational elements were also difficult to capture materially. That’s why I used two materials to construct the work.
The metal plates—Their circular form resembles music stands, and they reminded me of the semi-circular setups often seen in jazz performances. I installed a parabolic speaker on top, so inside the circular space you could hear the most basic rhythm and drum beats. It's not a full composition, but rather the “foundation” of it. The book element—The piece also includes a book-like part (the one you saw on the website). There is only one copy. After listening to the very first version of my own performance, I took the sounds and emotions I felt at that moment and collaged them into pages, cutting them freely and intuitively. The fact that it cannot be recreated is like the improvisational sections of jazz—you can’t perform them the same way twice. I wanted to preserve the raw feeling of the moment when the song was written.
The metal was a new material for me, so the process came with many challenges. In the end, it gave the work a sense of solidity—a foundation holding the spontaneous elements above it. It became a metaphor for freedom resting on structure and format.
You mentioned the gesture-like patch on the surface—yes, that was added later. It represents a kind of performative form. Back when my band wrote the song, we were all inexperienced and writing simply to submit homework. In rehearsals and in our one and only performance, because we couldn’t speak while playing, we used hand gestures to communicate when to move on to the next section. That stage communication also became part of the work.
Phrase Shall Not Tell
Keyi Zhang: Your artist book Phrase Shall Not Tell, created with your friend, feels both conceptual and observational. What inspired it, and how did you two make it?
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Alaya Lee: It is also a book, but less regular in form—closer to a traditional artist book. The final form emerged from making it together with a friend. We lived together at 1140, and since our route to school was a straight line, we walked every day instead of taking the bus. Many ideas came from those walks. He is from mainland China, and I’m from Taiwan; in Taiwan, address plates follow a fixed template, and I saw similar formats in Shanghai as well. But in Chicago, we noticed that every building had a different typeface for its address numbers, and each building seemed to carry a different “language.” We watched Lola Run together, and its narrative structure reminded us of our daily back-and-forth between home and school. So we created this visual artist book using the “empty spaces between numbers.”
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The digressions under the black-background photographs came from the thoughts we had when seeing those numbers. Like when sketching for graphic design, you develop random associations with materials. Those texts are exactly the spontaneous ideas we had in those moments, and they record a strange yet fitting friendship between us. We developed these associations partly because we passed Chicago’s subway every day. Whenever a train came, the intense noise interrupted our conversations completely. The numbers we saw in the abrupt silence triggered these thoughts. The book became a month-long record of our thinking—a project that is both experimental and documentary rather than commercial or strictly logical.
Album Cover Design
Keyi Zhang: How did your collaboration with the musician expand into the Offsync album and tour visuals? How do you translate music into visual form?
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Alaya Lee: Let me talk about Offsync. It looks like a simple album cover at first, but it eventually expanded into full tour visual planning. Last year, I accompanied the musician on tour across Japan, Taiwan, mainland China, and Europe. The concept of the album comes from the Buddhist idea of “impermanence.” He grew up in rural Hokkaido and later moved to New York, experiencing cultural shock, changes in social values, and various interpersonal entanglements. Each song corresponds to a different phase in these transitions. The core ideas include rupture, acceptance, fusion, and fragmentation. I translated these into graphic forms, screen-printed them, scanned them, and moved them into digital work. For the tour, I used letterpress and premaking to develop posters, creating a more immersive environment. The whole system became a comprehensive and evolving design. I’ve worked on two tours with him, and this one was much more complete. The pieces below the main album visuals are singles—they belong to the same series, linked to the musician’s marketing strategy.
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I first collaborated with him because his musical background—traditional Japanese harmony and musical theater—merged with New York’s pop, electronic, hip-hop, and street music. That cultural blend resonated with my own upbringing and experience of “language translation,” so we became close friends and collaborators. Liu is the full album; another track reflects his linguistic shock when he first arrived in New York, filled with sounds reminiscent of Japanese arcade games, and I matched the visuals accordingly. My workflow is usually: he gives me one “initial thought,” and I listen repeatedly to build visuals from it. Words often oversimplify emotions, so we don’t discuss the meaning in depth. Music cannot be summarized by a few keywords, which is why I translate it through musical structure, electronic texturing, and layers of sound. For example, in unaffected spell, he only said: “Children know what truly matters.” After listening to the whole track, I felt a sense of “clarity.” Adults carry too many concerns and lose sight of what’s essential, but the original intention never disappears. I used gradients to express this—like falling through an opening in the middle, yet the core remains.
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These works are hard to describe precisely; they come mostly from sensory and intuitive responses.
INTERVIEWER: KEYI ZHANG
CURATOR: KE ZHANG
EDITOR: CHENYU LIN
GRAPHIC DESIGNER: YUXUAN WEI
Alaya Lee
Hi, I’m Alaya.
A freelance book creator, graphic designer, and visual artist currently based in Taiwan, working across international projects in Los Angeles and New York. My independent projects explore the intersection of visual language, identity, and sound—drawing from relationships between characters, musical notation, and artistic structure. Alongside that, I collaborate with musicians, brands, and art events to create design systems that are rooted in narrative and cultural context. These collaborations often involve brand identity development, album artwork, event visuals, editorial design, and creative direction—transforming abstract concepts into cohesive visual languages that resonate with audiences and elevate brand presence.