Space of Contemplation: Glimpse of Memories

Gallery SpaceTime presents its inaugural exhibition, Space of Contemplation: Glimpse of Memories, a solo exhibition by Guiyoung Lee, on view from 30 May to 21 June 2026. The exhibition brings together works from two of Lee’s defining series, Space of Contemplation and Gwanghwamun, alongside new paintings, unfolding structural spaces where memory and time overlap through her distinctive language of layers and light.

The works in this exhibition begin with a memory of her father. In the years after the Korean War, as the country rose from ruin, he worked as an engineer designing infrastructure. Whenever his work took him abroad, he sent postcards home, and the foreign landscapes in them were a small window that nurtured young Guiyoung’s imagination, the first spark for building her own visual language. Those memories have layered themselves across her work ever since, and this exhibition is a tribute to her father, who passed away in 2018 and remains deeply rooted in her life, as well as the record of an artist’s journey.

That overlapping memory runs deepest through the Gwanghwamun-Haetae series. She has sustained this series since the early 2000s, for more than twenty-five years now, and it is not limited to the gate as it appears today. Since Gwanghwamun was first built in 1395, it has been destroyed and rebuilt again and again, through numerous wars, the Japanese colonial period, and later the Korean War. The gate itself is a record, across time and space, of that repeated destruction and reconstruction, and in her works Guiyoung has captured every moment of the gate that has passed through that site, by reconstructing memory and space.

This first exhibition at Gallery SpaceTime, a space the two artists built together in Gyeongju, brings Guiyoung’s established works together with her new paintings, Four Seasons of Gyeongju. For her, Gyeongju is not only a historically significant city where a thousand years of Silla-era relics lie dormant, but also a place that holds her childhood memories. Gallery SpaceTime and this Four Seasons of Gyeongju series are themselves the very process of revisiting that memory and realizing Space of Contemplation, and that memory runs through every part of the work. Aptly, as the first exhibition for a gallery named SpaceTime, this is a culmination of her past and her present.