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YOUR LOVE IS NOT GOOD

Johanna Hedva

Tautly woven, richly textured, and twisting, this novel lays bare our deepest and darkest desires about art, ambition, and family.

A painter in Los Angeles and Berlin's insular art scenes, the narrator begins work on a series of paintings featuring her muse Hanne: Gorgeous, cruel, and white, her legible beauty draws everyone to her, including the narrator, who remains haunted into adulthood by her Korean father's abandonment of his family, as well as the specter of her beguiling white mother Marina. The paintings prove to be a hit, resulting in her first sold out show. Unable to separate her desire to paint Hanne with her desire for her, the narrator resolves to bring Hanne with her to Berlin, where she spends half the year.

Meanwhile, a petition started by the Black performance artist Iris Wells is making the rounds in the art community, calling for the boycott of major museums and art galleries for their imperialist and racist practices. The disconnect between the narrator's implicit support for Iris' petition and her identity as a biracial Korean American artist, and her increasing dependence on and attraction to the mercurial Hanne, whose alluring beauty is so overwhelmingly rooted in her whiteness, leads to increasingly unstable and erratic behavior, and the slow but inevitable fracturing of her psyche.

Ferocious, hilarious, carnal, ecstatic: Hedva's language dissolves our fictions of the self in queer acid. Marrying the glamour of Clarice Lispector with the urgent viscerality of Han Kang, Johanna Hedva's YOUR LOVE IS NOT GOOD is a laugh-out-loud satire of the contemporary art world, a devastating portrait of trauma and psychological fragmentation, and a mystical treatise on what it feels like for the political and personal to penetrate, and ultimately disintegrate into, each other.

Johanna Hedva (they/them) is a Korean-American writer, artist, musician, and astrologer, who lives in LA and Berlin. They are the author of the essay "Sick Woman Theory," which was translated into Albanian, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Korean, Russian, Danish, Turkish, and Slovak. Their work has been shown in Berlin at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Klosterruine, and Institute of Cultural Inquiry; The Institute of Contemporary Arts in London; Performance Space New York; Gyeongnam Art Museum in South Korea; the LA Architecture and Design Museum; and the Museum of Contemporary Art on the Moon.

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Book Published 2023-05-23 by And Other Stories
Book Published 2023-05-23 by And Other Stories

Comments

Your Love Is Not Good is a dazzling tale of claustrophobia and neglect. Swinging deftly between savage realism, scathing social satire, and brutal erotic haze, Johanna Hedva moves from agony to alchemy in this meticulously layered portrait of intimate corruption. Bursting into the broken places between shame and self-creation, trauma and accountability, righteousness and complicity, Your Love Is Not Good cracks open the art world to exorcise the pain of belonging.

It's more than all this, but here is something about labor, the capitalist inseams in Identity, as expressed in an international art market that careens its participants-- or is it the art?-- towards suicide. For those needing-- by hook or by crook, by rope, knife, mirror, or by truck-- to leave something, or the art world, or the debt-collision of whatever they're doing, or even the internet for the next 24 goddamned hours, Your Love Is Not Good is very worth your beautiful time.

A thin permeable line between love and hate, pain and pleasure, self-love, self-flagellation, and total narcissism. Hedva's characters show us the complexities of being (in)human(e) beings and push our faces into the mud, an antagonism inflicted unto ourselves as we bully, bruise, blur, and break our way into the waking world. Hedva's willingness to parse apart "love" from "goodness" is the honesty we're all here and have been waiting for.

By turns funny, brutal, and (surprisingly) tender, Your Love is Not Good is a major achievement. Hedva's prose - which is gusty and taut - conveys a thrumming, kaleidoscopically constructed narrative structure to produce for the reader an experience of something incredibly intimate, something profuse, raw, erotic and challenging. Your Love is Not Good contains revelations (both vibrating and appalling) about artists and practice, and about contemporary art worlds. An instant classic/must-read/ important addition to the (woefully scanty) genre of books by artists about art-life. A very moving read.

This precise page-turner of a tale about bad or nonexistent mothers, race, and the erotics of painting masterfully pins the art world to the buckram of its specimen tray, pointed sentence after sentence. Here everyone loses gorgeously, definitively - and lucky readers learn a lot about the game.

Electric, pornographic, mischievous, and deeply funny. Your Love is Not Good is a parable of the artist who in search of beauty encounters something more poetic: ruin. Burn your diaries, kill your darlings, and go toast your real friends - this is the summer beach read you'll be talking about for the rest of the year.

This precise page-turner of a tale about bad or nonexistent mothers, race, and the erotics of painting masterfully pins the art world to the buckram of its specimen tray, pointed sentence after sentence. Here everyone loses gorgeously, definitively - and lucky readers learn a lot about the game.

Your Love Is Not Good is a whirlwind, and a mural, and a mirror - Hedva's prose is incisive and empathetic, wholly comedic and deeply poignant. This story about the life of our ideas, the trajectory of our dreams, and the burden of our loves is wildly moving and entirely original. Hedva deftly juggles questions of ambition and debt with what we owe others, and what we owe ourselves, resulting in a novel that's both honest and enrapturing. Your Love Is Not Good is a genuine blast.