What Happens When Desire Fuels a Life

When we meet Jin, the protagonist of R. O. Kwon’s new novel, Exhibit, the 29-year-old photographer is in a holding pattern: For months, she’s been incapable of producing a single image she wants to keep. Joining this creative atrophy is a new, existential gulf in her marriage: Philip, her husband, suddenly wants a child, and no part of Jin echoes the sentiment. Such disconnects might prompt a person on the cusp of their 30s to seek the guidance of friends, a therapist, or perhaps religion—time-honored, if also unexciting, options for someone invested in resolving their personal or marital conflicts. Jin, however, finds herself taking a very different route. Early in Exhibit, she goes from privately nursing her frustrations to sharing them with an alluring stranger. In place of confusion, she begins to feel something that had been eluding her: intense, exhilarating desire.

Philip hadn’t just presented Jin with a surprising new wish to have a child; he’d also been struggling to indulge one of her emergent longings. “Philip, I wish you’d hurt me,” she says early in the novel. While Philip strains to understand why Jin might want to engage in BDSM, the stranger Jin confides in is not a newcomer to the practice. Lidija Jung, an injured ballerina Jin met through a mutual friend, eagerly accepts Jin’s need to be submissive—to derive pleasure from pain being inflicted on her by someone she trusts—with eager acceptance. Stern and daring, she ushers Jin into the world of kink, a foray that reignites the frustrated photographer’s creativity. Their escalating intimacy becomes a container for Jin’s guilt over the yearnings she doesn’t feel, and an accelerant for the ones she does.  

Like most affairs, the illicit relationship at the center of Kwon’s novel does not actually begin with sex. Jin has been hiding the conflict in her marriage from her loved ones, but it’s one of the first secrets she admits to Lidija—the only other Korean American woman at a friend’s party. The pull she feels toward Lidija is instantaneous and impossible to ignore. In her memory of their first encounter, Jin recalls Lidija sticking out as though a spotlight is shining on her—“this large halo, glaring like a path to the sun.” In a conversation that begins poolside and stretches late into the night around a firepit, Jin divulges her artistic ambitions and erotic desires. “Lidija’s life had but slight overlap with mine,” she thinks. “I might risk being honest.” But any distance between the women is short-lived, and the risk wildly underestimated.

Soon, Jin’s life revolves almost entirely around Lidija, who gives Jin space to explore her interest in kink without fear of judgment. 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.

In vignettes that jump between periods of Jin’s life, Exhibit sketches a portrait of a woman at odds with the expectations placed on her. Once intent on surrendering her life to the Lord, she loses her faith during her college years—yet unlike the fanatical cult devotee at the center of Kwon’s first novel, The Incendiaries, Jin isn’t led to violence by her disillusionment. Photography offered one path to catharsis for Jin’s spiritual crisis: She made large-scale triptychs depicting “lustful pilgrims who, for a sight of the desired face, will trek land, beg, hope, abjure, living discalced.” These snapshots, which sublimate her prior devotion, anchored a buzzy solo exhibition—and, months later, still attract the ire of religious zealots who deemed it sacrilegious. As Jin wrestles with public accusations of blasphemy, she also feels the weight of a rift with her mother, who refused to attend her daughter’s secular wedding. The mother-daughter scenes are some of the novel’s most affecting, showing the ripple effects of Jin’s selfish rebellions outside the narrow domains of romance or religion. That familial titles—mother, father—are written only in Hangul deepens the sense of strained, diasporic intimacy.

[Read: The generational clash at Pride is actually a sign of progress]

Before the start of her relationship with Lidija, Jin had already spent years of her marriage outside the bounds of socially acceptable femininity: She never wanted to become a mother, and didn’t pretend otherwise. Often, she found, her refusal to have a child seemed to upset people—a judgment that did not extend to men, as no one had thought Philip was strange for not imagining himself a father when they’d married. For women, she concludes, the decision not to have children represents a fundamental rejection of the natural order, a defiance that could very well signal something more sinister: “People start asking, So, what else might this bitch think of doing?” Lidija observes in one of her many brisk, illuminating exchanges with Jin.

Jin’s queerness adds an additional layer to what she experiences as widespread suspicion of child-free women’s motives.  The novel channels—and reframes—a point that the author has made in her own life: In 2018, Kwon, who is married, came out as bisexual on Twitter. In an essay explaining this decision, Kwon wrote that the second-most-common lie about bisexual people is that “we’re unusually promiscuous, sexually greedy, incapable of monogamy. None of this is true.” Indeed, Exhibit takes great care to show that Jin’s bisexuality isn’t what compels her to cheat: Jin had slept with several women before meeting Philip, and publicly came out while married. The lust she feels for Lidija isn’t the result of lifelong queer repression; Jin’s destructive decisions are her own choices, not the supposedly innate pathology of all bisexual people. Jin is painfully aware of these attitudes, and of beliefs about queer people within her own community. Even when she’s acting reprehensibly, Jin still values pushing back against the dogma of elders who insist that queerness is a foreign plague afflicting white people, not Koreans.

Spending time with Lidija, a relationship that is clarifying and sacrosanct even as it sows deceit, offers Jin a reprieve from ill-fitting roles: dutiful daughter, reverent parishioner, self-sacrificing wife. With Lidija, Jin is neither a heretic nor a would-be mother. She’s a formidable artist, one whose dormant craft is reinvigorated by the freedom and inspiration she finds in another Korean American woman. Insulated from the power imbalances that restrict women’s lives, Jin can finally reckon with the role that power plays in sex. Providing Jin the pain she craves, the pain it took her so long to ask for, doesn’t give Lidija any pause. To Jin, the affair is a kind of revelation. “I’d leapt past shame to a fresh, unruled place,” she thinks.

Exhibit spends considerable time exploring how Jin’s and Lidija’s innermost desires are refracted through another damaging external lens: common racist stereotypes that portray Asian, and Asian American, women as naturally subservient. As a high-profile ballerina, “Lidija’s life relied, for the most part, on white people’s rating of bodies on the stage. Often, hers might be judged foreign.” Lidija couldn’t change how other people assessed her body. But she did, until her injury, have power over what it could achieve, and her penchant for control offstage is inextricable from her artistic mandate. Lidija, who has trained her own body to withstand pain, trains Jin’s body to do the same, and the indulgent interplay sparks something in both women.

With Lidija, Jin no longer has to hide, or apologize for her submission. But Jin still struggles to fully feel, much less publicly embrace, her love of kink, and as she considers the possibility of exhibiting self-portraits as a submissive, the thought inflames the same anxieties that had kept her from sharing this part of herself with her husband. Kink doesn’t exist in a vacuum; the racism that shapes so many other parts of American life can influence how people engage with it. Projecting images of her consenting to submission would still be “just what people expect, that I’ll be servile, quiet,” she tells Lidija. “I’ll add to the china-doll trope. It gets us killed.”

Exhibit treats both art and desire as serious pursuits, so the weighty proclamation doesn’t feel out of place in the women’s conversation. But Lidija doesn’t reflect the same anxiety back to Jin. Irreverent and self-assured, she challenges Jin’s timidity without dismissing the concern. The exchange is so tender that, for a moment, it’s tempting to forget that most secrets like theirs don’t stay hidden. 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.