Praise for Exhibit
"A hypnotic queer love story full of lust and longing...a haunting romance about desire, obsession, and ambition that is sure to get your heart rate up." —Time Magazine
"Bewitching." —People Magazine
"A highly sensory experience, awash in petals and colors, smells and flavors, that adds to the literature on a proclivity much discussed and often misunderstood. It lingers like a mysterious, multihued bruise." —The New York Times
"Pulses with the queer desire of Korean women, past and present." —San Francisco Chronicle
“An expansive view of the things women are punished for wanting…unflinching." —The Atlantic
“One of the most buzzed-about books of the year…fiery, sexual, and undeniably original.”—Poets & Writers
"R.O. Kwon extracts hidden, taboo desires with precision, and her hair-raising prose sizzles."—KQED
"A searing study of art, desire, and bodily and intellectual freedom...Kwon's sentences are like grenades, carefully wrought and concentrated with meaning." —Shelf Awareness
"Kwon’s prose is unlike any other, sensuous and sumptuous and yet razor-sharp." —Electric Literature
"In a hypnotic, sensual stream of consciousness...Kwon explores an intimacy that grows into obsession, revealing insights into the nature of power, sexuality, and free will." —Bustle
"An exhilarating novel about being caught between the desires of the future and the specters of the past." —Nylon
"Muscular and intelligent...A bold, tough novel that invites the viewer’s gaze and stares defiantly back." —Kirkus
"Displays, in stark relief, the patterns created by what we repress, what we celebrate, and how we transform shame into joy: it’s exquisitely curated and terrifically complicated." —Chicago Review of Books
"Kwon acknowledges the chasm between religious experience and language, which can be (in charmed circumstances) only temporarily, precariously bridged. For Kwon, religion names experience at the border of the speakable and unspeakable, the personal and the public. Her novels understand that we lean on what renders us unsteady, that desire inhabits a realm reason can only glimpse, and that the cliché about journey and destination gets it doubly wrong because neither term, being too solid and whole, captures the (ex)believer’s jittery sense of endless circling.” —The Los Angeles Review of Books
“In prose at once sharp and lush, Kwon crafts a gripping tale of a woman wrestling with the past, while boldly making her own future. A haunting and powerful exploration of art, racism, feminism, and desire, this novel will stay with me a long time.”
—Madeline Miller, New York Times bestselling author of Circe and The Song of Achilles
“Exhibit is sensational – a novel that's both intimate and operatic, singular and world-encompassing. Kwon's prose is soulful and piercing, chronicling the many ways we lose and find ourselves, blending love and sex and fables between the infinite folds that encompass desire. Exhibit is entirely captivating, and Kwon is truly masterful; it's a book for the mind and the heart and the body, an actual tour de force.”
—Bryan Washington, bestselling author of Family Meal and Memorial
“Exhibit is extraordinary: brisk, jolting, brilliant, beautiful, true. A ghost story, a tale of passion, a captivating portrait of how art is made, it turns myths upside down, assumptions inside out, all in the most exquisite prose in the bookstore. Kwon is one of the finest American writers, and her latest is a must for all readers.”
—Andrew Sean Greer, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Less is Lost
"I tore through this. Exhibit explores how obliteration can be a kind of rebirth, how the nuances of that are complicated by the constraints of chosen and socially imposed identities. Kwon writes about art and ardor with urgency."
—Raven Leilani, New York Times bestselling author of Luster
"A rare jewel of a book, at once forceful and unrepentant, delicate and shimmering. R. O. Kwon carves language into a wondrous, jagged thing, revealing facets of desire usually hidden. To read Exhibit is to feel time slow down."
—C Pam Zhang, bestselling author of How Much of These Hills Is Gold and Land of Milk and Honey
04/01/2024
Kwon's follow-up to The Incendiaries provides a glimpse inside the lives and marriage of Philip and his artist/photographer wife, Jin. After the two meet ballet dancer Lidija at a party, Jin and Lidija forge a friendship that deepens as Jin confides the difficulties in her marriage. Jin and Lidija soon begin an affair, with Lidija as the dominatrix in their BDSM relationship. Interspersed within this story are chapters that eerily relay the words of a Korean kiaseng (akin to a geisha), telling of her enslavement at the age of six and later of her own desires with a woman lover. Kwon specifically touches upon the fetishized perception of Asian women in society and, as in her previous novel, dissects the lives of a couple in conflict, where a third party becomes a divisive threat. She explores themes of traditional and nontraditional love, marriage, and parenthood. Race, culture, and identity are also addressed, especially when readers later learn that Philip's birth name was Felipe, and he grew up speaking Spanish. VERDICT Fragmented chapters, as is Kwon's style, might make this novel a challenging read for some, but the work offers much for book groups and individuals to ponder.—Shirley Quan
2024-02-17
An artist at a crossroads in her career and personal life develops a relationship with a ballet dancer.
Jin Han is a photographer on the edge of 30. She’s had acclaim in the past with a series about religious pilgrims, but she’s afraid the “image has left”—she hasn’t produced any work worth keeping in a long time. She’s under a different kind of pressure from her husband, Philip, who, despite agreeing early in their relationship not to have children, seems to have changed his mind. In Jin’s liminal state, she can’t help but ponder the story passed down through her family about a curse on them originated by a long-ago kisaeng—a girl sold into courtesanship. (The profane kisaeng cuts into the narrative from time to time to tell her own story.) The curse foretells that Jin will steer her life into ruins; it’s just as she’s pondering how this could unfold that she meets Lidija Jung. Korean like Jin, Lidija gave herself that name as a child when she devoted her life to ballet. Immediately, the women are drawn to each other; through Lidija, Jin will learn about freedom from shame and expectation—and the consequences, both elating and frightening, of that same freedom. As ever, Kwon’s style may divide readers. In a book all about image and presentation, the baroque sentences make conceptual sense. But at the level of plot, the writing is often clipped and elliptical, withholding a great deal when it comes to action. Like overexposed photographs, this strategy is both luminescent and obfuscating: It can be hard to see to the heart of the matter. Nevertheless, Kwon’s novel is a muscular and intelligent examination of the layers of Jin’s identity.
A bold, tough novel that invites the viewer’s gaze and stares defiantly back.
