After we meet Jin, the protagonist of R. O. Kwon’s new novel, Exhibit, the 29-year-old photographer is in a holding sample: For months, she’s been incapable of manufacturing a single picture she needs to maintain. Becoming a member of this inventive atrophy is a brand new, existential gulf in her marriage: Philip, her husband, abruptly needs a baby, and no a part of Jin echoes the sentiment. Such disconnects may immediate an individual on the cusp of their 30s to hunt the steering of associates, a therapist, or maybe faith—time-honored, if additionally unexciting, choices for somebody invested in resolving their private or marital conflicts. Jin, nonetheless, finds herself taking a really completely different route. Early in Exhibit, she goes from privately nursing her frustrations to sharing them with an alluring stranger. Instead of confusion, she begins to really feel one thing that had been eluding her: intense, exhilarating need.
Philip hadn’t simply offered Jin with a stunning new want to have a baby; he’d additionally been struggling to indulge one in every of her emergent longings. “Philip, I want you’d damage me,” she says early within the novel. Whereas Philip strains to grasp why Jin may need to have interaction in BDSM, the stranger Jin confides in will not be a newcomer to the follow. Lidija Jung, an injured ballerina Jin met by a mutual pal, eagerly accepts Jin’s must be submissive—to derive pleasure from ache being inflicted on her by somebody she trusts—with keen acceptance. Stern and daring, she ushers Jin into the world of kink, a foray that reignites the annoyed photographer’s creativity. Their escalating intimacy turns into a container for Jin’s guilt over the yearnings she doesn’t really feel, and an accelerant for those she does.
Like most affairs, the illicit relationship on the middle of Kwon’s novel doesn’t really start with intercourse. Jin has been hiding the battle in her marriage from her family members, nevertheless it’s one of many first secrets and techniques she admits to Lidija—the one different Korean American girl at a pal’s occasion. The pull she feels towards Lidija is instantaneous and not possible to disregard. In her reminiscence of their first encounter, Jin recollects Lidija protruding as if a highlight is shining on her—“this massive halo, obtrusive like a path to the solar.” In a dialog that begins poolside and stretches late into the evening round a firepit, Jin divulges her inventive ambitions and erotic wishes. “Lidija’s life had however slight overlap with mine,” she thinks. “I would threat being trustworthy.” However any distance between the ladies is short-lived, and the danger wildly underestimated.
Quickly, Jin’s life revolves nearly totally round Lidija, who provides Jin area to discover her curiosity in kink with out concern of judgment. Complicating the tidy ethical containers of a simple infidelity story, Exhibit takes an expansive view of the issues that girls are punished for wanting. At occasions, the sheer ferocity of Jin’s need is uncomfortable to learn. However the novel doesn’t demand a reader’s approval of Jin’s dishonest; whether or not she is justified in hurtling towards her urges issues lower than the spectacle of her craving. Looking and introspective, Exhibit displays a number of the similar social points that Kwon has addressed in her nonfiction—the stigmatization of kink, the complexities of queerness, and the fixed, destabilizing menace of violence towards Asian girls. Kwon presents these ideas as boundaries to self-discovery: Jin’s clandestine journey teaches her, partially, how to need.
In vignettes that leap between intervals of Jin’s life, Exhibit sketches a portrait of a girl at odds with the expectations positioned on her. As soon as intent on surrendering her life to the Lord, she loses her religion throughout her school years—but in contrast to the fanatical cult devotee on the middle of Kwon’s first novel, The Incendiaries, Jin isn’t led to violence by her disillusionment. Images supplied one path to catharsis for Jin’s religious disaster: She made large-scale triptychs depicting “lustful pilgrims who, for a sight of the specified face, will trek land, beg, hope, abjure, residing discalced.” These snapshots, which sublimate her prior devotion, anchored a buzzy solo exhibition—and, months later, nonetheless appeal to the ire of spiritual zealots who deemed it sacrilegious. As Jin wrestles with public accusations of blasphemy, she additionally feels the load of a rift together with her mom, who refused to attend her daughter’s secular wedding ceremony. The mother-daughter scenes are a number of the novel’s most affecting, displaying the ripple results of Jin’s egocentric rebellions exterior the slim domains of romance or faith. That familial titles—mom, father—are written solely in Hangul deepens the sense of strained, diasporic intimacy.
Earlier than the beginning of her relationship with Lidija, Jin had already spent years of her marriage exterior the bounds of socially acceptable femininity: She by no means wished to grow to be a mom, and didn’t faux in any other case. Typically, she discovered, her refusal to have a baby appeared to upset folks—a judgment that didn’t prolong to males, as nobody had thought Philip was unusual for not imagining himself a father once they’d married. For ladies, she concludes, the choice to not have kids represents a basic rejection of the pure order, a defiance that would very properly sign one thing extra sinister: “Folks begin asking, So, what else may this bitch consider doing?” Lidija observes in one in every of her many brisk, illuminating exchanges with Jin.
Jin’s queerness provides an extra layer to what she experiences as widespread suspicion of child-free girls’s motives. The novel channels—and reframes—a degree that the writer has made in her personal life: In 2018, Kwon, who’s married, got here out as bisexual on Twitter. In an essay explaining this resolution, Kwon wrote that the second-most-common lie about bisexual folks is that “we’re unusually promiscuous, sexually grasping, incapable of monogamy. None of that is true.” Certainly, Exhibit takes nice care to indicate that Jin’s bisexuality isn’t what compels her to cheat: Jin had slept with a number of girls earlier than assembly Philip, and publicly got here out whereas married. The lust she feels for Lidija isn’t the results of lifelong queer repression; Jin’s damaging selections are her personal decisions, not the supposedly innate pathology of all bisexual folks. Jin is painfully conscious of those attitudes, and of beliefs about queer folks inside her personal group. Even when she’s appearing reprehensibly, Jin nonetheless values pushing again towards the dogma of elders who insist that queerness is a international plague afflicting white folks, not Koreans.
Spending time with Lidija, a relationship that’s clarifying and sacrosanct even because it sows deceit, affords Jin a reprieve from ill-fitting roles: dutiful daughter, reverent parishioner, self-sacrificing spouse. With Lidija, Jin is neither a heretic nor a would-be mom. She’s a formidable artist, one whose dormant craft is reinvigorated by the liberty and inspiration she finds in one other Korean American girl. Insulated from the ability imbalances that limit girls’s lives, Jin can lastly reckon with the function that energy performs in intercourse. Offering Jin the ache she craves, the ache it took her so lengthy to ask for, doesn’t give Lidija any pause. To Jin, the affair is a type of revelation. “I’d leapt previous disgrace to a contemporary, unruled place,” she thinks.
Exhibit spends appreciable time exploring how Jin’s and Lidija’s innermost wishes are refracted by one other damaging exterior lens: widespread racist stereotypes that painting Asian, and Asian American, girls as naturally subservient. As a high-profile ballerina, “Lidija’s life relied, for probably the most half, on white folks’s score of our bodies on the stage. Typically, hers is likely to be judged international.” Lidija couldn’t change how different folks assessed her physique. However she did, till her damage, have energy over what it may obtain, and her penchant for management offstage is inextricable from her inventive mandate. Lidija, who has educated her personal physique to face up to ache, trains Jin’s physique to do the identical, and the indulgent interaction sparks one thing in each girls.
With Lidija, Jin now not has to cover, or apologize for her submission. However Jin nonetheless struggles to completely really feel, a lot much less publicly embrace, her love of kink, and as she considers the potential for exhibiting self-portraits as a submissive, the thought inflames the identical anxieties that had saved her from sharing this a part of herself together with her husband. Kink doesn’t exist in a vacuum; the racism that shapes so many different components of American life can affect how folks have interaction with it. Projecting photographs of her consenting to submission would nonetheless be “simply what folks anticipate, that I’ll be servile, quiet,” she tells Lidija. “I’ll add to the china-doll trope. It will get us killed.”
Exhibit treats each artwork and need as severe pursuits, so the weighty proclamation doesn’t really feel misplaced within the girls’s dialog. However Lidija doesn’t replicate the identical nervousness again to Jin. Irreverent and confident, she challenges Jin’s timidity with out dismissing the priority. The alternate is so tender that, for a second, it’s tempting to neglect that almost all secrets and techniques like theirs don’t keep hidden. It doesn’t matter what turns into of the affair, although, Jin will emerge a special model of herself. Having ached for therefore lengthy, she’s reworked by the fun—and peril—of getting what she needs. Exhibit’s unflinching portrayal asks what we’d study from confronting a number of the causes for her stasis. Jin’s misdeeds are fictional, however the societal constraints she faces exist properly exterior the novel’s pages.
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