From the author of The Incendiaries. At a lavish party in the hills outside of San Francisco, Jin Han meets Lidija Jung and nothing will ever be the same for either woman. A brilliant, young photographer, Jin is at a crossroads in her work, in her marriage to college sweetheart Phillip, in who she is and who she wants to be. Lidija is a glamorous, injured world-class ballerina on hiatus from her ballet company under mysterious circumstances. Drawn to each other by their intense artistic drives, the two women talk all night. Cracked open, Jin finds herself telling Lidija about a old familial curse, breaking a lifelong promise; she's been told that if she doesn't keep the curse a secret, she risks losing everything. As Jin and Lidija become more entangled, they realize they share more than the ferocity of their ambition, and begin to explore hidden desires. Something is ignited in Jin: her art, her body, and her sense of self changed forever. But can she avoid the specter of the curse?
Complicating the tidy moral boxes of a straightforward infidelity story, Exhibit takes an expansive view of the things that women are punished for wanting. At times, the sheer ferocity of Jin’s desire is uncomfortable to read. But the novel doesn’t demand a reader’s approval of Jin’s cheating; whether she is justified in hurtling toward her urges matters less than the spectacle of her craving. Searching and introspective, Exhibit reflects some of the same social issues that Kwon has addressed in her nonfiction—the stigmatization of kink, the complexities of queerness, and the constant, destabilizing threat of violence against Asian women. Kwon presents these concepts as barriers to self-discovery: Jin’s clandestine journey teaches her, in part, how to want ... No matter what becomes of the affair, though, Jin will emerge a different version of herself. Having ached for so long, she’s transformed by the thrill—and peril—of getting what she wants. Exhibit’s unflinching portrayal asks what we might learn from confronting some of the reasons for her stasis. Jin’s misdeeds are fictional, but the societal constraints she faces exist well outside the novel’s pages.
Hypnotic and sometimes perplexing ... Kwon stretches and pauses the language to its outer limits, as if in a series of tendus and arabesques ... Exhibit is 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.
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 ... 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.
