YOUR LOVE IS NOT GOOD

A queer Korean American artist interrogates the legacy and aftermath of Whiteness in the form of beauty, suffering, desire, and the complex interchange of power in this autofictive roman à clef.

The narrator of this lush and brutal novel is a study in dualities. Her father is Korean and abandons the family when she is around 10; her mother is White and loves her in a narcissistic, abusive way. Moreover, the narrator is a painter whose career centers in both the sweltering sunshine of Los Angeles and the eternal nocturne of Berlin, a figurative artist whose work underscores the complex interdependence of beauty, race, and power even as it nods to Western art’s tradition of “painting beautiful white women, the kind who always had more money, beauty and power than the painter”; and she is a queer woman with a submission kink whose “fetish for giving away…power [is] actually about controlling it.” After a period of relative stasis in her career, the narrator has two important solo shows lined up but finds herself without inspiration. Her search for a muse leads to Hanne, an LA art-world siren who initially attracts her with the proud, heedless power of her beauty and quickly becomes the focal point not only for the narrator's art, but also for the dynamic conflict between the narrator's own ideas about Whiteness—how it is “hard to paint precisely because it’s everywhere and in everything.…It’s the image of the world. And yet no one can see it for itself because there’s no such thing as an ipseity of white…”—and desire, where it comes from and who controls both its expression and its repercussions. The paintings of Hanne result in the narrator's first sold-out show, but just as she is poised to capitalize on that success, an influential Black performance artist publishes a petition calling for all artists of color to boycott museums and galleries with operating budgets over $1 million for their imperialist and racist exploitation of those artists, with the narrator's upcoming venues among them. Conflicted over the opposing impulses of her desire for recognition and solidarity, economic success and artistic authenticity, excellence and anonymity, the narrator spends a long, dark night of the soul spiraling around the splendor of self-destruction like a moth to a singular flame. Impassioned, wry, compassionate, and hell-raising, this novel illuminates its frangible but resilient world the way a painter uses color on canvas to illuminate the focal point of her vision—building layer after layer of meaning until the image appears as if it has always been there for us to see.

A resplendent and fearless book. Must read.