With its final days approaching, Guimi You’s “When the Sun Shines Again” offers a timely invitation to slow down and look closely. On view at Lehmann Maupin in New York, the exhibition brings together new paintings centered on an elemental but profound idea: what it means to begin again.
A Meditation on Returning by Guimi You
Guimi You artist portrait, February 2026, photo by Guimi You Studio, courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Seoul, and London.
Guimi You, “Golden,” 2026, oil on linen, 74 x 59 7/8 x 1 1/8 inches, courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Seoul, and London.
For Guimi You, sunlight becomes a recurring image of renewal. Darkness can obscure what lies ahead, while morning gradually allows forms to reappear. Her paintings inhabit that passage between uncertainty and clarity, creating spaces where hope does not arrive as a grand revelation, but gathers slowly through attention.
At the heart of the exhibition is Painting, Again, which draws from the experiences of close friends who have returned to artistic practice after years devoted to caregiving and domestic life. Once connected through art school, these women saw their paths diverge as responsibilities changed. Eventually, they began finding small spaces in their daily lives in which to paint again—a corner of a room, a patch of floor, or a quiet morning after their children had gone to school.
Guimi You incorporates paintings made by these friends directly into her own composition. Each friend selected a work with which she felt particularly connected, allowing images of solitary figures, landscapes, domestic gestures, and everyday life to coexist within You’s pictorial world. The result is a moving meditation on shared authorship and solidarity, where painting becomes not simply an individual act, but a way of returning to oneself alongside others.
Between Silence and Light at Lehmann Maupin
“When the Sun Shines Again,” Guimi You, installation view at Lehmann Maupin New York, photography by Studio Kukla, courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Seoul, and London.
The exhibition’s atmosphere is equally important to its themes. In works including The Shape of Silence and Let the Sunlight In, Guimi You considers the transformative possibilities of ceramics, drawing inspiration from time spent in a sunlit pottery studio. The processes of throwing, glazing, and firing require patience while also introducing variables beyond the artist’s complete control. For You, the spinning wheel becomes a metaphor for a life reorganized around process rather than outcome.
That emphasis on slowness distinguishes Guimi You’s paintings within an accelerated image culture. Rather than relying on spectacle or dramatic narrative, her work asks for sustained looking. Figures linger. Landscapes dissolve. Meaning emerges gradually, through time spent with the image.
This approach is rooted in You’s background in East Asian painting, where evocation and atmosphere can take precedence over literal depiction. Having also lived in the United Kingdom and United States, You later immersed herself in Western painting and developed a practice that brings together the delicacy of ink with the material depth of oil.
Landscapes of Memory on View in New York
Guimi You, “Let the Sunlight in,” 2026, oil on linen, 65 x 79 7/8 x 1 1/8 inches, courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Seoul, and London.
That synthesis is particularly apparent in You’s landscapes, where the external world becomes a reflection of interior experience. Misty gardens, still ponds, hillsides, and quiet interiors are rendered with finely modulated color and translucent layers, allowing figures and surroundings to seem to merge.
In Violet Haze, for example, a woman smokes alone in a park enveloped in mauve fog. She moves deeper into the garden despite warning signs, while smoke, foliage, and atmosphere gradually blur the distinction between figure and environment. The scene carries a sense of longing, alienation, and uncertainty, but it is not without possibility. Within the obscurity, the exhibition’s larger promise of clarity and renewal remains present.
Across “When the Sun Shines Again,” You positions landscape as something more than an escape. It becomes a psychological space—a place to consider memory, subjectivity, and our relationship to the world around us. Her anonymous figures similarly resist fixed narratives, inviting viewers to project their own experiences of solitude, contemplation, and transition onto the scenes.
As the exhibition nears its close, that sense of transition feels especially resonant. “When the Sun Shines Again” ultimately proposes that beginning again does not require certainty. It can happen quietly, through the recovery of a creative practice, the return to a familiar landscape, or simply the patience to wait for light to reveal what was already there. In You’s paintings, hope emerges not by denying darkness, but by allowing us to look through it.
“When the Sun Shines Again” is on view at Lehmann Maupin, 501 W 24th Street, New York.
“When the Sun Shines Again,” Guimi You, installation view at Lehmann Maupin New York, photography by Studio Kukla, courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Seoul, and London.
Guimi You, “Painting, Again,” 2026, oil on linen, 65 x 81 7/8 x 1 1/8 inches, courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Seoul, and London.
Guimi You, “Spring Walk,” 2026, oil on linen, 65 x 81 7/8 x 1 1/8 inches, courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Seoul, and London.
