I'm afraid I bailed on this at about 20%. I just couldn't connect to any of the characters or figure out what was happening.

I may come back to it a later date, as the premise does sound like something I would appreciate.

Exhibit was intoxicating, I read it in one sitting. The writing is poetic and beautiful and terse. Exhibit is mostly about bodies, autonomy and art and will be confusing to most. It's so short that it skims the surface of a lot of themes and leaves the reader to fill in the gaps. I wish we'd got to linger with the characters a little more because they were almost too small to fit into the concepts.

I decided not to finish this at 32%. I just couldn't connect with the story, the characters are interesting but the prose is too florid for me. I don't feel there is enough of a hook to keep me interested in finishing the book.

Beautiful writing with a very confusing plot. I feel like there was something deeper to this novel that didn’t rise to the surface for me. Loved the concept, loved Kwon’s elegant prose, but it didn’t hit the mark for me.

Many thanks to NetGalley and Little,Brown for this ARC.

I’m one of the few people who enjoyed R.O. Kwon’s debut novel, The Incendiaries, so you can imagine how thrilled I was to pick up Exhibit. This new novel is as similar as it is extremely different from her first book, it’s one of these quiet literary fiction novels where very big things happen, but what seals the deal is the writing itself.

Exhibit follows a photographer named Jin Han, of the Han family. The Hans were cursed by a kisaeng and they are all doomed to die for love. Jin is haunted by this story as if it were a real threat and when we meet her, her life is in shambles: she’s lost her faith, her husband Philip has suddenly decided he wants a kid (she doesn’t), she can’t take photographs, and she’s come clean to Philip and told him she’s into masochism (he isn’t). Her life has been following a controlled path and now everything is chaos until she meets the ballerina Lidija Jung who lends her an ear and wants to help her out with some of her frustrations.

Before I started writing this review, I checked a few others and saw different theories about what this book is about. I think I’ll throw my own. I do think this is a book about the female body and what women owe to each other, but I think it’s mostly about control and chaos. There’s this line in one of Lizzy Mcalpine’s songs that goes ‘Lovely to sit between comfort and chaos,’ and this book felt like Jin’s comfort being shaken so hard she seeks a complete undoing to transform herself. Jiin talks about Ovid’s work in the book, and I think her whole journey is about an undoing that leads to a metamorphosis. And I’d argue this metamorphosis remains incomplete at the end, halted by something that happens (which I also interpreted as a test of faith? Idk, I have too many thoughts about this book).

I thought this was very good. The writing was impeccable and something I had not quite experienced before, I had to re-read bits all the time because of how indirect it is. I also found it interesting that Kwon told this story through narrative but also through mixed conversations - we are in the middle of dialogue, and what is not that direct dialogue, is Jin recollecting or retelling us a past/future conversation with Lidija. All the in-betweenness and atemporality of the narrative felt like a fever dream.

Another interesting thing I want to mention is Kwon’s decision to add hangul here. Jin refers to her mother as 엄마 and her dad as 아버지. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a book use Korean in hangul as opposed to romanized.

When it comes to this book deals a lot with the art world (photography and ballet mostly, for obvious reasons), kinks (this shouldn’t be a surprise considering Kwon edited Kink: Stories), the female body (and how men expect to have rights on it and what it does), women, and hiding secrets. It’s also sapphic/bi.