Lehmann Maupin is pleased to present Breath, Island, a solo exhibition of new paintings by South Korean artist Guimi You. Inspired by her recent solitary two-week journey to Korea’s Jeju Island, the works in this exhibition trace both the contours of the island’s volcanic terrain and the artist’s own inner landscapes. Through delicate, atmospheric brushwork and a sensibility rooted in East Asian painting traditions, You transforms Jeju’s flower-filled hillsides, lush botanic gardens, and quiet guest houses into intimate spaces of reflection and self-discovery. Breath, Island follows You’s inclusion in a number of recent institutional exhibitions, including those at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, the Columbus Museum of Art in Ohio, and the Institute of Contemporary Art in Miami, Florida.

Jeju Island, often described as Korea’s island of wind, stone, and women, holds a unique place in Korean cultural collective memory as both a natural sanctuary and nostalgic retreat. For You, its landscapes are both subject and mirror. Wandering its oreum (volcanic hills), resting beside ponds framed by blooming magnolia, or watching waterfalls carve their paths through black basalt, You allowed the rhythms of the island to shape her own: breath following landscape, painting following breath. Over time, her awareness surpassed the environment, reaching into the very experience of being alive.

Originally trained in East Asian painting, You’s understanding of East Asian pictorial traditions—where painting is not an act of depiction, but of evocation—anchors her approach. Her mark-making recalls the layered transparency of ink washes and the restrained harmony of traditional Korean landscapes, reminiscent of works like Jeong Seon’s Inwangjesaekdo, which capture not only form but atmosphere. Brushstrokes hover like mist, yet settle like memory.

At the same time, You’s years spent in the United Kingdom and United States imbued her practice with the materiality of oil painting and the structural dynamics of Western contemporary art. Her works exist between Eastern and Western legacies, and she approaches them through a lens of synthesis rather than negotiation. In her paintings, oil behaves like ink, and forms emerge with the lightness of thought. In balancing these disparate traditions, You’s paintings enter personal terrain—a space where East and West, past and present, landscape and self gently coalesce.

In Breath, Island, the act of painting is both record and refuge. Works such as Noble Silence (2025) depict the interior of the artist’s wooden guest house: a silent space that holds the sacred stillness of artistic solitude. Elsewhere, Rest (2025) captures figures lingering in a garden at the foot of Mt. Halla; here, human presence dissolves into landscape. In Pause (2025), a simple view of bonsai framed by a greenhouse window becomes a meditation on growth and restraint. Across the exhibition, traces of the artist herself—suggested silhouettes, personal objects, a figure mid-sketch—weave quietly throughout the scenes.

Breath, Island is less a chronicle of Jeju than a portrait of a painter in search of equilibrium. For You, painting is not a destination, but a passage: a way of translating identity into image and holding two worlds, East and West, within the same frame. In this sense, her paintings function as islands themselves—floating spaces where the memories of one place and the lessons of another can meet, pause, and breathe.