R.O. Kwon writes stunningly about the hunger for transcendence, for something larger than oneself, more encompassing than society. Her second novel, Exhibit, offers a brave, sometimes elliptical portrait of one woman’s liberation from the expectations of others. “A lot of the highly ambitious women I know and love feel a great deal of pressure to hide that ambition. I got curious about this dichotomy between what people want me to want and what I feel pressure to not want,” Kwon tells me about the seeds of the book, which she began writing in 2014. She wanted to see what would happen if she brought together women characters who want things for themselves and their art and let them “run after what they desire.”
Exhibit involves a fine arts photographer, Jin Han, who develops a kink-centered relationship with an injured principal ballerina, Lidija Jung. Both are Korean American and intensely dedicated to their respective arts, but otherwise they are a study in sharp contrasts. Jin is perfectionistic, haunted, restrained yet earnest. Her perspective, and desires, including for Lidija, drive the novel. Lidija, on the other hand, is bold, assertive, and resourceful. She wants movement and power.
Kwon’s first novel, The Incendiaries, took up the profound yearning for God and loss of faith that Kwon herself experienced. Such a crisis is echoed in the early pages of Exhibit, as Jin remembers the enormity of her own despair at falling away from Christianity: “Isolated, grief-wild, I’d picked through ruins He’d left behind. If I could still love this orphan world, deprived of His salvific light, which parts of it might even I, broken as I came, find worth prizing?”
Over the intervening years, however, art has taken religion’s exacting but glorious place in Jin’s cosmology.
Jin first encounters Lidija at an artist’s party in Marin, and they develop an immediate intimacy. She shares a bit of family lore, about an ancestor who falls in love with a kisaeng, or artistic courtesan, a relationship that ends in a double suicide after his parents disapprove. Throughout Exhibit, Kwon intersperses passages from the kisaeng’s point of view, which is blunt and fearless—“So, you jerks still think I died to be with him?” she asks—contrasting Jin’s precise narration of a differently illicit love.
As much as Exhibit hones in on desire, the novel also grapples with its opposite. Just before she and Lidija meet, Jin and her husband, Phillip, have been fighting about his newfound desire to have a child, breaking a firm understanding held since college that neither will want kids. As the marriage grows troubled, Jin’s dynamic with Lidija intensifies, becoming one of domme and sub. Themes of artistic ambition and sexual desires merge. Marks of pain and pleasure that Lidija inflicts become artistic fodder for Jin, who has been at a creative standstill. Her staged photographs of those marks bring ecstasy and seem inspired by images made by performance artist Ana Mendieta, particularly Imagen de Yagul in the series Silueta Works in Mexico.
While Kwon is comfortable listening to other people talk about their sex lives, she doesn’t discuss her own. Noting that this is a cultural trait in the Korean women she knows, she says, “There’s something in my body that doesn’t let it be an option.”
How then, I wonder, did she get past her fears while writing a truthful book about desires society forbids? By way of explanation, she recalls writing the book during the pandemic, amid an alarming uptick in violence against Asian American women. An essay she wrote on the topic generated thousands of messages sharing her fear and outrage, as well as a bevy of ignorant emails, including one that questioned whether the violence existed at all. Kwon was able to write the book only by telling herself nobody would ever see it, and she remains anxious that some readers will interpret Jin’s sexuality as reflective of the most dangerous stereotypes about Asian women—that they are docile and submissive.
“I thought about keeping all of that out,” Kwon recalls. “But then I thought of how much it would have meant to me to read this book when I was 17 and felt alone in the world. I wanted to meet that solitude. That’s often a driving force in my writing, the desire to provide fellowship, as so many books have done for me.” In 2021, such an impetus led her to coedit the anthology Kink with Garth Greenwell. Despite social media blowback that kink was anti-feminist or abusive, Kwon felt the book to be a communitarian effort that ultimately helped her complete Exhibit.
Part of what Exhibit does so exquisitely is to make Jin’s experience vividlty felt. Her voice is cambered, introspective yet aware of politics, which makes it both legible and meaningful. That’s due, in part, to Kwon’s intense devotion to the right word and her own simultaneous awareness of history and politics. She keeps a complete Oxford English Dictionary, which allows her to experiment with language by accessing the deep histories of words. This includes the need to reckon with certain broader implications. As an example, she mentions that while she loves English more than other tongues for the “richness of the language and how flexible it is,” it’s also “the language I know best because of imperialism.”
A related set of complications emerges throughout Exhibit; although the novel is set in the Bay Area, where kink and queer culture have had a long history, such scenes are, as the novel reflects, predominantly, sometimes uncomfortably, white. The result is a book that is both linguistically and tonally rigorous, informed by noticeable silences that cut against the grain of traditional bourgeois fiction, moving instead toward the negative space in the work of photographers such as Kwon’s beloved Ren Hang. Of Hang’s queer, stark, and frequently nude images, she says, “I’m not used to seeing bodies like mine, undressed.”
In that sense, Kwon explains, writing “feels like being a physical conduit for something that in some way genuinely exists. When I’m writing, so much of it is asking the book, What comes next?… What are you? Who are your people?… Trying to find my way to the book rather than making anything up.” She elaborates, “I’m just trying to get a sentence of passage to be as truthful and as alive as it possibly can be. And I find that to be an ecstatic state.” You can feel this in Jin’s description of how she feels as she prepares for a self-portrait: “I unfurled, florid with big, lush bruises. Petal hues; juice stain. I’d sprung colors, life, from pain.”
Similarly, Exhibit feels intended to free readers. It is a novel that makes profound and singular and visible private experiences often considered askance in American fiction, when they are considered at all. The effect is of a kind of openness, a nuanced patterning of shadow and light. “I wanted,” Kwon says, “to bring to what I was writing every ability I have as a writer and to say this, too, is literature.”•
Anita Felicelli is Alta Journal ’s books editor and the author of How We Know Our Time Travelers, Chimerica, and Love Songs for a Lost Continent.
