After exposing global voyeurism in The Disaster Tourist (2020), award-winning Korean writer Yun Ko-eun, with agile translator Lizzie Buehler, skillfully skewers the art industry in Art on Fire. Nine years ago, the photo Canyon Proposal transformed the art world when the photographer was revealed to be canine--a Papillon named Robert. The photo caught the late daughter of octogenarian businessman Mr Waldmann, who invites Robert to his Palm Springs, Calif., villa, where Robert becomes a "permanent guest." Upon Mr Waldmann's death, Robert is installed as head of the Robert Foundation.
Over the past seven years, the foundation has supported 20 artists with generous, four-month residencies at the Robert Museum of Art in Palm Springs. An Yiji, whose art career has stagnated while she struggles with low ratings working for a delivery app in Seoul, receives the latest invitation. Let the surreality begin.
Getting to Palm Springs is an ordeal: her airport pick-up never shows, fires cause extensive delays. Yiji secures her own ride, but is chastised when she arrives--and inexplicably treated like "an uninvited guest." Even Robert joins in the rebuke in a not-welcome letter, signed in gold-inked pawprint. Communication isn't exactly direct between dog and artist, requiring a black box and three intermediary interpreters, and still "phoenix" somehow becomes "mythical Korean pigeon." Between meals with Robert, trail runs with rentable canine companions, and inspirational location-scouting in a foundation-supplied Lamborghini, Yiji creates her art.
Yun's quotables are countless, her exposés relentless, not the least of which is, of course, that art's ultimate gatekeeping has gone to the dogs. Yun's clever layers are many, producing a biting demand to confront the deification (and commodification) of art, and the unchallenged assumptions of (mis)communication. --Terry Hong