Lehmann Maupin is pleased to present When the Sun Shines Again, a solo exhibition of new paintings by South Korean artist Guimi You. In this exhibition, the artist turns toward a quiet yet profound gesture: the act of beginning again. Conceived as a tribute to those who have returned to creating after time away, the works unfold through a recurring image of sunlight, an enduring symbol of clarity, renewal, and hope. If darkness unsettles us because it obscures what lies ahead, morning offers a gentle correction. As light enters, forms reappear, and with them, the possibility of continuation. It is within this passage, from obscurity to illumination, that the artist’s works take shape. When the Sun Shines Again marks You’s first major solo presentation in New York.
At its center is Painting, Again, a meditation on return. The artist draws from the lives of close friends, women who, after years devoted to caregiving and domestic life, have begun to reclaim their artistic practices. Once immersed in the shared experiences of art school, their paths diverged as time and responsibility intervened. Now, in the margins of their daily routines, they have carved out space to paint again. A corner of a room, a patch of floor, a quiet morning after sending children to school, these become sites of reawakening. Within the composition, works created by these friends are embedded into the painting itself, following conversations in which each selected the piece they felt most deeply connected to. Their images, of a woman at the sink, of a solitary figure, of landscapes and fleeting gestures, coexist within the artist’s own pictorial space. In this layering, authorship becomes shared, and painting becomes a site of quiet solidarity.
The Shape of Silence and Let the Sunlight In extend this reflection through the artist’s encounter with ceramics. Inspired by time spent in a sunlit pottery studio, these works trace a parallel narrative of transformation. Ceramics are shaped through a series of unseen processes, throwing, glazing, firing, each guided by variables that resist full control. Immersed in this environment, the artist found a resonance between the tactile act of shaping clay and the emotional terrain of beginning anew. The spinning wheel, steady yet open-ended, became a quiet metaphor for a life reoriented around process rather than outcome. In a contemporary context saturated with spectacle and immediacy, You’s work insists on slowness, attention, and emotional restraint. Her images resist narrative resolution and monumental drama, instead proposing a form of looking rooted in duration and contemplation. This refusal of excess situates her practice within a broader contemporary return to affect, interiority, and the ethics of seeing.
This sensibility carries into her landscapes drawn from places of personal memory. You renders misty, finely detailed environments where form and atmosphere dissolve into one another, transforming the landscape into a psychological and emotional terrain. In Violet Haze, a woman stands smoking within a park veiled in mauve fog, surrounded by softened foliage and warning signs she quietly ignores as she steps deeper into the garden. The drifting smoke, damp vegetation, and hazy atmosphere blur the boundary between figure and environment, suggesting a state of inward wandering shaped by longing, alienation, and emotional uncertainty. Yet within this darkness and obscurity lies the possibility of clarity and renewal, a tension that recurs throughout the artist’s work, where light and hope emerge precisely because darkness exists. The figure appears on the verge of dissolving into the landscape itself, suspended between isolation and revelation, uncertainty and quiet perseverance. Her approach synthesizes East Asian pictorial traditions of evocation and atmospheric transparency with Western lineages such as Romanticism and Surrealism, positioning landscape not as an escapist subject, but as a space for reflecting on memory, subjectivity, and how we situate ourselves within the world.
Bringing these intertwined narratives together, the exhibition serves as a meditation on time, resilience, and the fragile courage required to begin again. Here, painting is not simply an act of production, but a space of return, where light gathers, forms reemerge, and, slowly, hope takes shape once more.
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