Your Love is Not Good

Summary

At a party in Los Angeles, a queer Korean American painter spots a woman who instantly controls the room: gorgeous and distant and utterly white, the center of everyone's attention. She wants Hanne, or wants to be her, or to sully her, or destroy her, or consume her, or some confusion of all the above. She will use art to get closer to Hanne, beginning a series of paintings with her new muse as model.

When the paintings of Hanne become a hit, resulting in the artist's first sold-out show, she resolves to bring her new muse with her to Berlin, to continue their work, and her seduction. But a petition started by a Black performance artist begins making the rounds, calling for the boycott of major museums and art galleries for their imperialist and racist practices.

Torn between her desire to support the petition, to be a success, and to possess Hanne, the painter and her reality become more unstable and disorienting, unwilling to cut loose any one of her warring ambitions, yet unable to accommodate them all.

Your Love Is Not Good stuffs queer explosive into the cracks between identity and aspiration, between desire and art, and revels in the raining debris.

Contains mature themes.