R.O. Kwon on Writing About the Desire for Queer, Kinky Sex and the Cost of Being an Artist

How much are you willing to sacrifice for your desire? This is a central question of R.O. Kwon’s recent novel, Exhibit.

Written in urgent and lyrical prose, Exhibit follows two Korean American women—Jin, a photographer, and Lidija, a ballerina—as they push towards artistic ambition. When they are introduced, Jin has been in a long-term relationship with her husband, Philip, and both have agreed that children were not something they wanted, but Philip’s newfound desire to have a child has disrupted the life they’ve built, causing Jin to wonder how much of one’s core self and desires can be compromised for a relationship. As this question lingers in Jin’s mind, her relationship with Lidija deepens, and what starts out as a friendship between highly ambitious women, grows into a canvas for artistic and sexual exploration that will thrust Jin and her art to new edges.

I spoke with R.O. Kwon via zoom about sacrifice, the artistic drive, and choosing to be child-free. 

Shelby Hinte: Exhibit felt so authentic in its depiction of art and artists wanting so badly to be artists. I really loved the way you describe female characters being willing to go to any lengths necessary for their art. What drew you to writing about the artistic drive in that way?

R.O. Kwon: One way I’ve been describing it to people when asked for the one-sentence summary has been that Exhibit explores what you’d risk to pursue your core desires. What I was thinking as I wrote this was the way so many people are made to hide and suppress and kill and push to the sides what they truly want. Whether that has to do with sex or ambition or artistic ambition or food or even just a day to ourselves, it often seems like something that has to be defended.

I wanted to bring together three Korean women and see what happens when they ran after what they desired. I was especially interested in the ways in which so many of my writer and artist friends are very ambitious in terms of what they want to do with their work, yet it continues to feel, even in 2024, that it’s dangerous to say something like, I am an ambitious woman. I was fascinated by that. Even that phrase, ambitious woman, carries more than a tinge of unlikability or selfishness. I’m fascinated by that, and I’m infuriated, too.

SH: It’s interesting, too, because the women’s dynamic with each other is so different from what is usually depicted. Lidija expresses that as a ballerina, so much of her experience and career was about being in competition with other women, and yet her relation ship with Jin is unique because they’re not in competition with one another. At least not as artists, so they get to be really honest about wanting things that maybe would be frowned upon wanting, whether it’s ambition or art, in another space. It can be scary to say, I want to be an artist, which these women are doing, and they’re making a lot of sacrifices to be artists and achieve making art at a very high level. Why do you think that it can be so intimidating for people to want to own that?

ROK: I think there continues to be a belief that the desire to be an artist is selfish. And I just so strongly believe that it’s not. I feel very lucky to get to be a writer, to get to be an artist. And I don’t think there’s anything selfish about it. I know people will disagree with me, but books have saved my life. There are points when I have felt so desperately lonely in various ways that I wasn’t sure how to go on, honestly. In those times, books provided fellowship, a really lifesaving fellowship. I don’t at all believe that wanting to have a life of making art is in any way a selfish impulse. Of course, especially in America, there is a very real practical economic difficulty of how to be an artist where health insurance is often dependent on your job and you want to have a sustainable life.

SH: Your characters all have to sacrifice things that sometimes put them in precarious positions. This feels amplified because they’re both women and they’re both Korean, and so it feels like that precarity is even more intense for them. And I’m wondering what you think it is that makes it more precarious to set out to become an artist as either a woman or a woman of color?

ROK: Jin is a photographer and Lidija is in ballet. This wasn’t quite on purpose, but at some point, I realized that both fields favor men. And ballet, if you think about ballet, people tend to think first of ballerinas, but aside from who exactly is on the stage, most choreographers are men. Most directors of the ballet are men. The discipline itself is incredibly hard on women’s bodies. Dancing on pointe is so physically difficult on the body. I remember talking to a friend who’s a doctor who loves to watch dance, but he cannot watch ballet because even though he finds it to be incredibly beautiful, he just says that, as a doctor, he sees what they’re doing to their bodies, and he’s just like, the body is not built for this. You’re really not supposed to put all your weight on that tiny surface area. It’s not uncommon for a ballerina to have to retire in their early thirties.

As a Korean woman, I’m an immigrant. My parents are immigrants. When I went to college, I majored in economics, even though I took writing classes on the side the whole time, and I really wanted to be a writer, I couldn’t see how to do it. My parents have had serious financial difficulties. There really weren’t that many models that I knew of for what it meant to be a Korean writer in America, what it meant to be a Korean American writer. I think that paucity of models, initially, kept me from believing that I could do it too. 

SH: I was just listening to this podcast about Olympic athletes and how so many of them put all their energy into sport with no guarantee of what happens afterwards. Ballet in your book feels like this too, and I was so moved by the way Lidija orients her whole life around this unpredictable art form. She is willing to devote so much of her life, really her entire life, to this thing that is, on the grand scheme of an entire life, quite small. What do you think compels certain people to be able to orient their lives around a goal like that? Specifically art?

ROK: I think it’s true of every, maybe every is a strong word, but at least the artists I’m close to, the writers I’m close to, and for me, it does feel closer to being a calling or a vocation than it does to being any kind of choice. I know that if I’m not writing regularly I very quickly start feeling dead inside. Not necessarily like fully dead [laughs], but the longer I’m away from it, the more dead I feel. 

I grew up really religious, and my life goal until I lost my faith at seventeen, was to be a pastor or maybe even a religious recluse. I thought I could live in a cave and just commune with the divine. That was my hope. But that, too, of course is a calling. I think it can be very hard for an artist to not be able to do what they feel called to do. 

SH: So much of this book is also about Jin having lost her faith to some degree. But art itself, at least the way I interpreted the way you wrote it, does feel spiritual in some ways. Like, it seems like each of them are ambitious, but they’re seeking something more than what the external world can give them through their art. I was curious about your own personal experience with art. What is it that you feel you’re seeking? Or what do you imagine writing gives you other than just not feeling dead inside? Obviously, that’s a big one.

ROK: It’s definitely preferable to not feel dead inside. Other people said this to me, and I didn’t believe them, but I say this to my students all the time, and I always at least hope that some of them will be wiser than I was, and perhaps believe me. But it’s true that external basics once you publish a book can make it easier to get teaching jobs and speaking gigs that can help support you. This is important. We live in America. We live under capitalism. All of this is true. It’s also true that there’s no external validation that has ever begun to equal what it can feel like when the writing’s going really well. It’s not often available, but when the writing is going really well, when I’m deep in a sentence and it’s all I’m thinking about and I’m just trying to get it to be the most truthful version of itself, the most like itself it can possibly be, when I’m doing that, I feel as though I lose the ego. I forget that I have a body and that dissolution feels ecstatic in a way that approximates what I used to feel with religion. It’s one of the deepest joys I know of. It’s a great blessing to be able to have access to that. I’m always afraid it’ll leave one day, you know? Jin is grappling with that because she hasn’t been able to take a photo that she can tolerate having around for a year, which is a very long time. I’m always afraid that the words will leave the way my faith left. I can’t go through that. I get so superstitious about anything writing related. What does it feel like for you?

SH: I think you described it pretty beautifully. I think I feel the same way. That’s the reason I come to writing. It’s one of the two things I do, writing and long-distance running, where I feel I can focus wholly on the moment, where I’m not thinking about anything else. I’m the kind of person where my mind is normally reeling. I really agree with you that to write is as close to a spiritual experience as I can have, which to me just feels like not being stuck in a self-centered physical form.

ROK: I love that you find that in running too. 

SH: Jin is such an interesting character to me because she really is focused on the process, but she is such a perfectionist. And I love that she keeps repeating to Lidija, some version of, “nothing might come of this,” when she’s taking these photos of Lidija, yet she seems to have such faith, or maybe it’s an obsession, I don’t know how you saw it when you were writing her, but to me it felt like faith that if she just keeps taking these photos, if she just keeps going through these actions, then something will materialize. How important do you think just being in process or collecting material is in making art?

ROK: I’m such an inefficient writer. I don’t even believe in that word quite as it applies to art, but Incendiaries took me ten years to write. Exhibit took me nine. There was some overlapping because I was starting to write to agents about Incendiaries and I was just waiting, so I started Exhibit while I was waiting to hear back. I do believe that each book is a palimpsest. All of it gets in somehow. Everything I removed, all the storylines that didn’t end up making it in, all the research, even just reading a book of poetry that that may or may not speak to the book that you’re working on, it is in there somehow. Up until something like nine months before I finished editing Exhibit, it was more than twice as long as it is now. It was something like 90,000 plus words long. And it’s not that I had any preconceived notions for how long the book had to be. I strongly believe in following what the book itself seems to want to be, and asking the characters what they want. But at some point, about nine months before the end, I started seeing things that I didn’t feel belonged in the book, or redundancies that didn’t feel necessary, so I took so much out. But I can still feel what I took out sort of pulsing beneath what’s there. 

SH: I didn’t realize you’d been working on this book for so long. I think that can be scary and intimidating for an artist to be in it and not know where it’s going to go. How do you keep faith in the work?

ROK: People often ask: Who do you write for? And I used to think that my answer was almost overly straightforward, which is really, I’m writing for myself. I really can’t really think very much about who might be reading it or what’s going to happen to it out in the world. But if I’m writing for myself, then I’m writing for an audience where the first row is a Korean American woman, and that’s not a body that has been centered very often in American letters. So, there’s that. And I think a lot about losing my faith when I was seventeen. It was a devastating loss for me. It was really just like a pivotal loss that has divided my life into a before and after. And it was a time of truly desperate loneliness. I lost so much with that faith. I lost my community. I lost this God that I really planned to devote my life to serving. I think in some ways I’m always trying to write for that girl who felt alone in the world, and to say, you’re not that alone, and you never were. That’s often been very useful in terms of reminding myself what on earth I’m doing six years into a book.

SH: It’s interesting hearing you talk so much about the fracturing of having lost faith because there is this sense that Jin is experiencing a split self. She has this side of herself she is hiding from her husband, and I kept thinking about how painful it is to have two conflicting desires in the same body. She wants this relationship with her husband, but she also wants her relationship with Lidija, but the two can’t coexist. What do you think is most interesting in exploring the territory of a character who wants two conflicting things? 

ROK: One of the questions I was fascinated by in this novel was exploring the various ways we’re supposed to adjust our desires but how we can’t change something so core to who we are. There’s really no killing them. Even if it were possible, it wouldn’t feel right to kill them. That of course comes up with sexual desire, but it also comes up very much with the question of children. Philip and Jin have been together a long time, and they’d agreed from the start that they were never going to have kids. And then Philip wakes up one day he’s just like, I want kids. The desire has come upon him, and Jin very much doesn’t have that desire. It’s something that you really can’t quite compromise on. There’s no such thing as half a child. I’m fascinated by that question of to what extent can we change when we want to change? And to what extent does change even make sense. The heartbreak that Jin feels is partly that she can’t help Philip with what he wants. In some ways Jin feels abandoned. I’m not sure that her relationship with Lidija would’ve played out the way it did if it weren’t for this initial split with Philip.

SH: I love the way you write about being a woman who is child-free. I feel like we’re still lacking so much of that in literature, and it’s really exciting to see a book that deeply explores what it means to make that choice without it necessarily being distilled to just a positive or just negative choice. There’s this scene where you describe the dilemma of either being an artist or a mother, and Lidija’s describing the choice as a threat. She says:

“It’s still, as a life path, distinct. Implied is the fact that I’m picking this, not that. People start asking, So, what else might this bitch think of doing? Jin, imagine if I had a child, but kept dancing. The jerks, they’d still be pissed. I’d be called unfit, a bad parent. Or if I did give birth, then quit ballet, I’d be judged for staying home.” 

Reading that, I just felt like, there really is no winning as a woman. Do you think this expectation and judgment of women in relation to the choices they make about whether or not to have children is still as prominent as it once was? How does that show up in the spaces that you inhabit?

ROK: That means a lot to me that that part resonated with you. I don’t have kids. The majority of my friends don’t have kids. But I have very dear friends who have kids as well. And it feels like in my circles of friends, we love each other and we support each other, and we’re so behind each other’s choices, and we really view it that each person should get to live the life that feels like the fullest possible life to them in terms of whether or not they’re going to have kids. But I think there’s still so much pressure. I feel it all the time still. I’ve written about being child-free and about the ways in which it used to bewilder me that not wanting children is considered selfish. It’s difficult to think of many other instances where not wanting something is considered to be selfish. It is confusing to think specifically not wanting something that does not even yet exist is selfish. Like, this hypothetical child does not exist. To not want this hypothetical child and for it to considered selfish, is bewildering. The Pope, who is famously a lifelong celibate, considers that to be selfish. I think there’s still so much pressure. 

SH: Can you talk more about the challenges about writing about sexual desire?  

ROK: I’ve tried so hard, and for so long, to shake off the anxieties I have around writing about sexual desire. But I’m Korean, ex-Catholic, and ex-Evangelical—these are all shame, and guilt-riddled cultures. For these reasons, and more, it can seem as though I’ll never be able to shake off the shame I feel if I even talk about sex in public, let alone write and publish a whole novel centering desire of various kinds, including ambition, physical desires, and sexual appetite. Especially, as is true in Exhibit, a desire for queer, kinky sex. It’s also true, though, that books and other art forms have provided salvific fellowship when I’ve felt most alone in the world. Loneliness kills; shame can be a terrible, life-warping poison. I feel strongly that I have to do what I can to offer that kind of loneliness-antidote to others.

SH: Since so much of the book is about sacrifice, I wanted to ask, do you think that sacrifice or suffering are necessary for art? And, if so, what would you say is the biggest sacrifice you’ve made for your own art?

ROK: I wouldn’t necessarily say that sacrifice and suffering are necessary for art. I believe in fear as a guiding sign for what I want to write. I also want to push up against the limits of what I’m capable of with every word that I write in a novel if at all possible. And so, my experience of writing this book has involved what sometimes amounted to daily panic attacks and anxiety attacks. I generally have some insomnia, but there were periods with writing this book when I wasn’t sleeping. I remember there was a point when I was so exhausted because I was sleeping so little and driving so hard toward a deadline that I was lightly hallucinating most of the time. I didn’t know how else to write this. I felt physically compelled to write it in a certain way and to try to get it right. It was physically very arduous. So much so that I think I’m still recovering from that. So, no, I don’t believe that art requires suffering. But my experience of writing this book is that it did physically take a lot out of me.