This winter-spring season, Marian Goodman Gallery presents Jongsuk Yoon: Azalea Spring, the Korean-born artist’s first solo exhibition in New York, on view at 385 Broadway, New York, NY. The show is on view until 21 March 2026. The exhibition features works that explore memory, nature, and the immersive possibilities of colour.

At the heart of Azalea Spring is Yoon’s distinctive visual language: painterly fields that hover between landscape and emotion. Rather than depicting literal topographies, Yoon constructs what she calls “landscapes of the soul”.

Born in South Korea and trained at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, Yoon draws on a rich synthesis of East Asian pictorial traditions and European-American modernist idioms. Her childhood memories of rivers and mountains near Onyang reverberate throughout her canvases, which radiate with the light, bloom, and colour of the natural world without ever settling into straightforward representation.

Large-format paintings such as May Landscape, Azalea, Spring Spring, and Mountains envelop viewers in panoramas of pinks, reds, and yellows, evoking the warmth and bloom of spring. Medium-scale works like Sansu, June, and Yellow Sea offer subtler chromatic relationships, quiet moments nested within Yoon’s broader visual cosmos. Yoon’s process is intuitive and meditative; she begins without sketch or plan, letting gesture and color guide the work’s evolution. “I don’t depict what I see,” she explains, “I am inside it — I act, responding to what the painting tells me.”

A series of gouaches on paper, including Waves, Heat, and August Heat, reveal the artist’s spontaneity, emphasizing swift brushwork and a lighter emotional register that seeks “the empty space within” beyond cultural memory.

Yoon’s contributions to contemporary painting have earned her international recognition, including the Transfuge Art Prize for Best International Artist 2025, and she currently has concurrent exhibitions in Europe, including a large-scale presentation at mumok in Vienna.

In Azalea Spring, Yoon invites viewers not merely to witness landscapes but to inhabit them, to feel the afterglow of remembered blooms and to enter a space where painting becomes a terrain of emotion, intuition, and poetic resonance.

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