On the cusp of turning 30, photographer Jin Han finds herself at a crossroads in her life. Professionally, she feels uninspired at work and is unable to find any of her recent work worth keeping. Personally, her marriage is falling apart. Jin’s husband of 11 years is unable to fulfill her masochist’s sexual desires. She is also feeling betrayed by his sudden change of heart – his desire to embrace parenthood, a feeling that Jin does not share.
It is during this tumultuous time that Jin has a chance meeting with an alluring ballerina on hiatus due to her injury. Korean by birth, this woman goes by the name Lidija which was chosen to seem “a little more Slavic”, like the dancers she idolises. Jin finds herself confiding her desires in her since, unlike her husband, Lidija has “no existing high opinion of me that I might lose”. They both find a unique connection with each other which sets them on a path laden with euphoria and chaos.
Like her non-fiction Kink, in this novel Kwon dissects the stigma and shame associated with kinks, especially when it comes to women. She describes the guilt of “wanting” that women carry and how it contradicts the preconceptions of an Asian woman as “pliant, subject”. Interspersed throughout the narrative are chapters that examine the price of female desire through the eyes of Kisaeng, the ghost of a courtesan who has been haunting Jin’s family and has put a curse on them.
The writing is tactile and incorporates vivid visual imagery. “Bold obliques of Lidija’s clavicles, raised as if taking flight.” However certain narrative choices make the story appear contrived. The characters frequently keep calling each other by name in dialogue, which probably was a ploy to anchor the reader in but ends up disengaging them. The baroque prose at times strays into incoherence and discursiveness. “His dirge, updraft of spent love, rising as if with spite from depths His going left open.”
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Exhibit delves into queerness and how it is perceived by older generations as “alien, a foreign blight. One striking white people, but not Koreans.” Like Kwon’s previous novel, The Incendiaries, this one also explores the dichotomies between evangelism and loss of faith, female desire and shame, and the self.
