How Artist Gumi You Infuse Current Events into Her Paintings

Diving into an alternative state of consciousness beyond the physical, Guimi You builds her practice around the wandering mind intertwining with reality, and the time she’s living in. In this solo presentation, You continues to approach each painting as a unit of bodily experience and psychological discovery, during both the everyday life before the pandemic and the time of emergency. Wildfire(2020) was stimulated by her memory of her and her son during the bay area’s wildfire season last year.

Amid a pandemic and wildfire air pollution, she was trapped at home with her son. The orange sky sheds light on the table, where she and her son were playing a board game to pass the time. The son appears to have a joy spark, while the mother looks pre- occupied by everything inside and outside the window.

Star of The Day (2020)tells the story of her son’s school “Zoom class ” during the quarantine. Each grid in the painting represents a student in Zoom.

The overlaying text is a quote from his son, after receiving the “star of the day” award from the teacher in the virtual class, despite not fully comprehending what it means to be in a pandemic as a child. While observing the inevitable irony of life, the artist also continually investigates her roles as a mother and artist.

Before her master’s study at the Royal College of Art in London, You received rigorous training in oriental painting in Korea. The landscapes, presences, and lived environments that she depicts are flushed with a blended sense of poetic nostalgia and playfulness in dialogue with the history of painting.

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Your paintings also evoke Rene Marguerite’s dreamlike, psychedelic scenes, Pierre Bonnard’s pastel color choices, and Milton Avery’s simplicity. In these fantastical yet familiar worlds You constructed, the pervaded magical realism invites us to pass through the melancholia, yet still holding hope for the silver lining at the end of a dark tunnel.

Guimi You (b.1985 Seoul, Korea) lives and works in Albany, California. She received a MA in Painting from Royal College of Art, London, the United Kingdom in 2014, and a BFA and an MFA in Oriental Painting from Seoul National University, Korea, in 2008 and 2011. Solo exhibitions include “NADA Miami – solo presentation,” Helena Anrather in New York (2020); “Soft Light Somewhere,” Monya Rowe Gallery in New York (2020); “Mystical Moist Night Air,” in the same gallery (2018). Her work is in the public collections of the Museum of Art Seoul National University Seoul, Korea, and College of Fine Arts, Seoul National University Seoul, Korea.