R.O. Kwon on Writing Her Way Into a Book’s Most Truthful Version

R.O. Kwon first novel, The Incendiaries, made my top ten list of books in 2018 for BBC Culture: “Kwon’s finely polished first novel is an explosive mix, tracking the evolution of a cult that turns to violence, bombing abortion clinics.” Her second novel, Exhibit, is more intimate, an artfully crafted jewel highlighting the vulnerabilities, strengths, passions and ambitions of three Korean women—her narrator Jin Han, an innovative photographer whose desires are not aligning with those of her husband Philip; Lidija, an injured world-class ballerina, who lures Jin into new experiences in her love and work, and a kisaeng whose curse upon the Han family puts Jin and those who love her at risk. Our email conversation took place on West Coast time.

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Jane Ciabattari: How have recent years of pandemic and turmoil affected your life, the writing and launch of Exhibit?

R.O. Kwon: In a lot of ways, but I’ll pick just one for now: I’m even more intensely grateful than I used to be each time a book, photo, or dance performance has required my full attention. It’s part of what art can offer, both to its maker and to a reader or viewer: the opportunity for deep absorption. Including and perhaps especially in times of crisis, it’s a large gift, one I can’t go without.

JC: Both Exhibit and your earlier novel, The Incendiaries, have epigrams from Clarice Lispector. How does she influence your work?

ROK: I’m often drawn to writing that seems to push up against the limits of what’s possible, what a person can do with language, and this is something Lispector does with all her fiction. I want and hope, with my fiction, to try to work at the outer limits of my own abilities; Lispector and others remind me of this wish.

JC: What was the seed the grew into this novel? An image? A feeling? A character? A flavor? A word or phrase? How did you come up with the title? Who designed the cover?

ROK: Exhibit explores what you’d risk to pursue your core desires. What first led to this book was the question of who gets to want what. I thought, as I wrote this novel, of the ways people can be made to suppress, deny, and hide what we deeply need and want, and what a violence that can be. In Exhibit, I brought together three Korean women who want a great deal, and seeing what happens if they run after what they desire.

For the title, my editor and I bounced around lists of potential titles. But nothing felt right until Exhibit. I love how faceted the word is, how it reflects several of the book’s central motifs. The cover designer is Vi-An Nguyen; the image is by Eric Traore.

JC: How did you develop the distilled poetic language you use here, replete with imagery of fire and flight, rhythm, and the sensuality of bodies, performances, food? I could quote lines from virtually every page, beginning with your opening lines: “She’d go up the tall pine first. He flung his leg on a bough, close behind. She didn’t slip, her leaps agile. Hanbok silk, bright, swift, flared with each jump. If cloth tangled with a sprig, he lunged to help. In the fresh light, they kept going, as high as possible.”

ROK: Oh, thank you for saying that, Jane. It means so much to me.

If I could have chosen my life, I might have elected to be a poet, but alas. It’s obvious to me that I’m a prose writer—for one thing, even when I memorize a poem, I lose track of the line breaks.

But I do care desperately about language on the level of the word, the syllable. Exhibit didn’t feel done until I could turn to a page at random, pick out a few lines, and not need to change anything. I can easily spend a day worrying over one word, trying to get it right—so, I’m not the speediest of writers. Exhibit took nine years; The Incendiaries took ten (with overlap between the two, but still). I’m hoping the next book takes, who knows, six years! Six sounds manageable.

And I love what Susan Sontag says about the prose of poets, that their writing can have what she calls lexical inevitability, the sense that a line or paragraph couldn’t have existed in any other form. I get close to believing that a book I’m writing preexists me in an ideal form: it’s my job to find my way to that book. The other day, I read about an ancient Greek belief that an image preexists its incarnation in the world, and I thought, Oh yes, amen!

JC: Your intimate focus is on Jin Han, your narrator; Philip, her husband, and Lidija Jung, a star ballerina, the first Asian principal of her company, who is staying in the San Francisco Bay Area while recovering from an injury. Your themes are broad—art, racism, feminism, desire. What was the process through which you melded these themes into the unfolding narrative? What came first?

ROK: My first impulse is to say that, writing fiction, I follow the characters, and any motifs are of secondary importance.

So much of writing, for me, involves asking the characters who they are, what they need, how I’m failing them, how I could better listen to what they’re trying to tell me.

But going back to the initial question of what gets to want what, it’s also true that Jin and Lidija are both devoted to art forms—photography and ballet, respectively—that are dominated by men. Women make up less than a quarter of professional photographers, the vast majority of choreographers and artistic directors are men, etc. So, Jin’s and Lidija’s lives, desires, and ambitions—like my life, desires, and ambitions—are shaped by who they are and perceived as being.

JC: Your secondary story, the kisaeng’s story, as told to Jin Han, is woven in alternate chapters throughout the narrative, in gem-like settings of a few paragraphs each. “People said the kisaeng’s spirit, abiding, hostile to all Hans, kept us cursed,” you write. And a bit later, “Still, 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.” Revealing this story, with its family curse, puts Jin Han at risk, and yet….she makes that choice. This is one of many ways in which Jin Han moves toward risk in the course of the book. What empowers her?

ROK: I found writing Exhibit to be an anxiety-riddled experience, one that came with what could be daily, hours-long panic attacks and anxiety attacks. I had to tell myself, usually aloud, that I wasn’t going to let anyone read this book. It’s just you here, I kept saying. It was the only way I could write what often felt like a novel too private for me to able to publish.

Part of what alarmed me—and still alarms me, to be honest—is that I’m aware more than a few readers will assume the book is thinly veiled autobiography. And this is such an understandable impulse, given that this novel featuring queer Korean American women artists is written by a queer Korean American woman artist. But I’m ex-Catholic, ex-evangelical Protestant, and, as mentioned, a Korean woman: my body’s convinced I’m risking terrible danger by publishing a book that has so much to do with desire, and especially physical, sexual desire. I tell myself this is absurd; my body declines to believe me.

But I’ve also felt compelled to write this book, and that might be the most autobiographical aspect of Exhibit: the compulsion is stronger than the sense of risk. Jin shares this urge to place the needs of her work above her own needs, or maybe a more accurate way to say this is that her own well-being is inextricable from the well-being of her photos. It’s what first pulls Jin and Lidija toward each other: their obsession with and ambition for their work.

JC: How complicated was the research process for the story of the Kisaeng? The details of the art of photography? The world of professional ballet?

ROK: I did a lot of hands-on research, trying to learn with my body more of what my characters would know: I took ballet classes, photo classes, and a choreography class. I already loved looking at photos and watching dance; I read at length about both, and interviewed dancers and visual artists.

I also read a lot of kisaengs’ sijos, three-line poems, hoping to better understand Exhibit’s kisaeng’s voice. For a while, I got too hung up on getting the kisaeng-related historical details exactly right. But after a while, I realized: this kisaeng is a ghost talking through a shaman. She can fly. Maybe I could let myself relax, a little. Once I did so, she began coming to life.

JC: Elements of your first novel, The Incendiaries, appear as if a cameo in Exhibit. Your narrator, Jin Han, describes having taken photos of the Jejah cult at Edwards College, which had blown up abortion clinics. She ponders her classmate Phoebe Lin, who was said to have jumped into the Hudson and died. Jin Han stages a series of photos of Lin as if she had lived, with props and makeup, aging her own face. In the end, she deletes the Lin images from the exhibit, concerned about disturbing Lin’s friends. This impulse is a cue to many ways in which Jin Han pauses before plunging into the courageous and risk-taking work. Photography is also what she ventures as a way to replace her lost faith. Is this her art as a life’s purpose, a consecration, her fate?

ROK: If and when I’m deep in a sentence, trying to get it to be the most truthful version of itself, I lose all sense of an I, an ego. It’s not unrelated to the ecstasy I used to have in religious worship. Jin also finds this ecstatic dissolution in making photos, and it’s one of the greatest joys she knows.

JC: Lidija is a fascinating seductress, always luring Jin Han further into her desires. When they meet, Jin Han is blocked, unable to take photographs she finds acceptable. Lidija pulls her out of this phase, inspires her anew. Your descriptions of the ways in which Lidija pulls Jin Han further into her own specific erotic desires, into the next phase of her photography, into the possibilities that lie ahead, set Lidija up as an almost mythic creature, on a brief hiatus from her own single-minded focus on her ballet career, opening doors for Jin Han in her career, tempting her ever forward. It strikes me as a rare circumstance in which two gifted and focused female artists can connect in this way. How have the other women artists and writers in your life supported you in your work?

ROK: It’s hard to imagine what my life would be without the life-saving support of women artists and writers. In some ways, I thought of Exhibit as being an ode to this love and support. People of other genders also mean a lot to me and my work, but there’s still a pervasive belief that women are more likely to be incapable of helping other women, that we’re all going to be back-stabbing bitches who can’t be trusted with one another’s hearts. It’s such bullshit, an injurious lie built on our long histories as subalterns.

I turn to women friends all the time for help with my work and its attendant crises, anxieties, and confusions, as they turn to me, and thank god. Jane, you were one of the first writers to publicly champion my first novel, for the BBC. I love being a woman, so much; I love the women in my life.

JC: Jin Han rejects the traditional female role, including bearing children. Her biggest conflict with Philip comes at the opening of the book. They had both agreed to not have children when they married. Now, he is changing his mind. She cannot consider having a child. She asks for her own desire, and he cannot oblige. How likely that these desires, left unfulfilled, would end a marriage?

ROK: If two people in a monogamous partnership have opposing and strong feelings about whether or not to have a child, a large rift can open, one difficult to bridge. A true compromise isn’t quite possible; no half-children exist. Jin and Philip love each other very much, but once this rift divides them, they don’t know what to do next. In writing Exhibit, I was fascinated by the nature of desire: what can and can’t we change about ourselves? Who’s being asked or made to change, and which desires are more likely to be given primacy?

JC: What are you working on now/next?

ROK: I’ve started working on a third, inchoate novel. It will most likely inhabit the same fictional world as Exhibit and The Incendiaries—as far as I can tell, I seem to be working toward a triptych or quadriptych of loosely connected novels. I think Jin’s photos will show up in the next book, and am so excited to see what’s going to become of her art.

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Exhibit by R.O. Kwon is available from Riverhead Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.