Book Review: Exhibit: A Novel

“One doesn’t have to be fully liberated to do liberated and liberating things.” R.O. Kwon

With exacting yet poetic prose, Kwon’s second novel Exhibit dances along the perilous edge of desire and duty. The novel’s protagonist Jin is a photographer experiencing a lull in creativity before meeting a captivating new friend, an injured ballerina named Lidija.

Jin meets Lidija at a party and feels the pull of instant attraction, sensing Lidija’s singularity and strength. “It was a lifelong allure, the gloss of a bold, strong girl,” Jin thinks.

Jin has come to the party with her husband, Philip, a film producer, whom she met at a fictional college called Edwards. Readers of Kwon’s first novel, The Incendiaries, will recognize their alma mater as the setting for the formation of a dangerous cult, which is central to that novel’s plot. Themes of religious experience and loss of faith explored in The Incendiaries continue in Exhibit.

One of Jin’s photography projects is to reimagine an alternate ending for The Incendiaries protagonist, Phoebe, who fell into religious obsession in an extremist group. Jin takes out pictures of Phoebe, however, before showing her piece publicly so as not to offend one of their mutual acquaintances. This fictional tie-in allows the reader to imagine the world built in The Incendiaries has continued on and allowed new voices.

As Jin and Lidija are introduced, converse long into the night, and begin a new relationship, Jin finds sudden artistic charge. Lidija’s aesthetic integrity above all inspires Jin. She discloses her artistic ambitions with her new friend, and eventually reveals her taboo desires, which she cannot consummate with her husband. Jin suppresses her sexuality. Philip is not willing to explore her kink, and this silence is compounded by the cultural standards of her Korean heritage in which the topic is simply not discussed.

Kwon herself experienced ongoing panic attacks while writing Exhibit, imagining her own Korean family reading the novel, as she describes in an article for The Guardian. Although fictional, Kwon found exploring taboo subjects, like kink and queer sexuality, were intensely real, making Jin’s experience all the more vivid. The liminal space Jin and Lidija explore later in the novel is a powerful and intimate experience.

As Jin and Lidija grow closer, an interesting history is woven into Exhibit’s narrative. According to Jin’s family lore, a Korean courtesan—a kisaeng—died alongside her love when the couple was forbidden to marry. Jin’s family believes that the ghost of this woman and her thwarted desire has the power to ruin present-day relationships. But in brief, alternate chapters, the kisaeng tells her story in her own brash words, revealing a far different truth. Will Jin live out the curse? Or does the kisaeng’s actual experience unravel the entire myth?

In The Incendiaries and here, Kwon acknowledges the chasm between religious experience and descriptive language, which can only be tenuously bridged. In The Incendiaries, a main character cannot describe another’s religious conversion, thus elluding understanding. There is an indescribable quality to belief, which is something religion and art have in common.

Jin’s first photography show, featuring photographs of worshippers and self-portraits reenacting worship, is a direct response to losing her childhood faith. Jin describes her art:

I’d shot religious people in states of worship. Pilgrim sites. Baptist tent revivals. Isolated prophets. I shot while they’d whirl in fits. Dived prone in dirt. Singing, hands lifted, still Christ’s disciples. I had the subjects’ consent; I’d blown photos large. I paired, with each shot, a self-portrait. I staged photos, acting like the original. Praying, I’d felt as close as I’d get to Him. I devised short epistles, one-sided calls, to God.

She describes as a child wanting to give her life in service God. Yet while at college, she leaves her faith. In this state, she found art: “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?”

For Lidija, ballet is discipline, not faith. Her practice is physically demanding, and often physically painful, with the deceptive guise of beautiful ease. This push-pull between the outward image and inner conflict is endlessly compelling to Jin, who tries to understand Lidija’s resilience.

Kwon plays wonderfully with language in ways that are surprising, poetic, and skillful. Her ability to create a moment with a few specific descriptors is akin to an artist creating a scene with careful brushstrokes. Exhibit displays Jin and Lidija’s dynamic, asking the reader to see and feel these characters and their world. The novel resists a tidy ending, letting readers speculate on where Jin is headed, navigating the blurriness, establishing her own boundaries between pleasure and pain, art and life.

Grace Grocholski is a part-time librarian, full-time bookworm. In her spare time, she enjoys running, baking, and feeding her online chess addiction.