Guimi You’s New York debut turns on a deceptively simple idea: what does it look like to begin again?
At Lehmann Maupin in New York, the South Korean artist Guimi You (b. 1980s) is presenting “Guimi You: When the Sun Shines Again,” her first major solo exhibition in the city, on view June 11–August 14, 2026. The new paintings gather around a period of creative dormancy and the slow, often private work of returning to one’s practice after life has interrupted it.
Working from Seoul, You builds her images through translucent layers and a measured handling of tone, a method shaped in part by traditional Korean landscape ink painting. That training remains visible in the way her scenes seem to surface gradually, as if pulled from mist rather than drawn with hard edges. Her time studying in the United Kingdom and the United States also left a mark, sharpening her use of oil paint and helping her synthesize Eastern and Western approaches into a language that feels both intimate and slightly unreal.
The exhibition’s strongest works dwell in moments of quiet concentration. In “Spring Walk” (2026), a woman moves through a blue and purple dusk with a small dog at her side. “Golden” (2026) shows another figure reading in a room washed with light. Even “Let the Sunlight in” (2026), which omits a human presence, carries the sense of a life opening back toward possibility. These are not dramatic narratives. They are pauses, carefully held.
That restraint gives the show its emotional force. You is attentive to the unease that can accompany renewal: hesitation, isolation, the fear that creative confidence may not return on command. “Violet Haze” (2026) makes that tension explicit, with a hooded figure, cigarette smoke, warning signs on the ground, and a snake emerging from pastel vapor. The painting is the exhibition’s most unsettled image, and perhaps its most revealing.
Taken together, the works offer a quiet homage to artists and others who find themselves rebuilding a voice after interruption. In a city where debut exhibitions often arrive with noise, You’s paintings make a different case: that recovery can be gradual, reflective, and luminous.
