In the present day, Korean photographer Jin Han is living in San Francisco and married to her college boyfriend, an Argentine-American man who presents as White. She is aching for more while worried about the legend passed down through her family. “It might find me, this birthright evil. I’d flag it through a wild urge: to risk, for a futile, single love, all the ties I rated high. I had to kill this longing. If I didn’t, I’d light my life on fire.”
Sitting in a lecture given by a famed photographer, Jin listens closely. “It’s all licit, in photos,” the photographer says. “Nothing’s judged filth. Including sexual kinks, alas.” Jin loves the way that light can illuminate a subject without defining it. She knows that her true desires, under closer inspection, would only get her into trouble.
It’s while considering her hidden, dangerous depths that Jin meets Lidija, an injured ballerina. Despite her chosen Russian name, Lidija is also Korean, and there’s a nonverbal connection between the two women from the start. Does Lidija know Jin, or does she just recognize her unhappiness? Jin’s ache shines off her like the chrome of a new car.
Jin’s story is broken up by the kisaeng’s story, as told to Jin by her mother. As we eventually learn, the Romeo and Juliet label isn’t so accurately applied to the legend. The reader wonders why Jin’s mother tells her daughter a tale that comes across as a warning: Ask too much out of life and seek your own destruction. When Jin meets Lidija, she can’t even articulate what she wants. But it turns out Lidija is a good guesser.
Jin and her husband, Philip, have long agreed that they would never be parents, but now Philip wants a child. Jin wants it darker, as Leonard Cohen might sing. “I wish you’d hurt me,” she tells a horrified Philip. She senses that a child would be an ending. When her friend Elise, also a photographer, became a mother, “it was the last I’d heard of Elise’s hopes.”
Jin seems to have resigned herself to a life “buried, perhaps, but still living.” Philip can’t handle her desire, and she has a hard time expressing it to Lidija. Kwon is a deeply sensual writer, and Jin’s throbbing but tentative lust comes out in other ways, as in this passage suffused with food: “In Jinju, we had kelp-twined squid. I’d put on a long silk dress. Chili-spiced crab. Basil kimchi. Philip fiddled with the dress strap; he’d strip it off, at home, he said. Quince kalbi with pickled garlic. Jebi churi in rich kaenip oil. I’d turn the lights off, first.”
Kwon is also the author of “The Incendiaries,” a book about violence and faith. “Exhibit” includes references to a cult featured in the earlier novel. As Jin tells Lidija about a photo project: “I focused, I said, on a cult at Edwards, the college I’d attended. People in Jejah, this cult, had blown up abortion clinics.” Jin has lost her own faith, and her photos playing with religious themes get her into trouble with Christian groups. The only belief she has now is in the work, though she still speaks to God. Recalling Flannery O’Connor’s desirous prayer journals, she writes: “O Lord, I didn’t ask again. For so long, I’d thought, If I fell, I’d slip into a rift. But I had it wrong. Instead, I fell, then what I had pitch out of sight was all hope of finding You.”
Jin is on the search for her own personal Jesus — some strict machine that will give her life meaning. Where will she find it?
Both of Kwon’s novels bear epigraphs from the novelist Clarice Lispector. In “The Incendiaries”: “At the bottom of everything there is the hallelujah.” And in “Exhibit”: “Am I a monster or is this what it means to be human?” Lispector’s family fled to Brazil from Ukraine after World War I, when she was very young. Kwon was born in Seoul but moved to Los Angeles when she was 3. The specter of war and its trauma haunts both writers. “Spilt life fed this soil,” Jin reflects in Korea. “I was forged in ash. It helped explain this past, the sole hostile spirit. It lent people hope to think, Oh, if I do this, I’ll escape fresh pain. It’s nothing but a tale.”
Where Lispector’s work featured an intense stream of consciousness, Kwon is reserved; she doesn’t give her reader any more than what’s required, and “Exhibit” is brief, at just about 200 pages. This kind of writing can disguise an athletic literary talent. The idea of a divided self, a way of half-living, defines this book. Even the meaning of the title suggests an art exhibit, of course, but also the question of what we show with our lives. What kind of story do we tell others, and more important, ourselves? “Exhibit” gives us more questions than answers. As Jin discovers, a curse can keep people in line when they strain for a truer life.
Jessica Ferri is a writer based in Berkeley, Calif., and the author, most recently, of “Silent Cities San Francisco.”
correction
An earlier version of this review misidentified the racial identity of Jin Han’s husband, Philip. He is Latino, not White. The review has been corrected.
