Art on Fire
Translated by Lizzie Buehler
About
An Yiji's art career has stalled — so when the prestigious Robert Foundation offers an all-expenses-paid residency in California, she can't refuse. The catch: the foundation's patron is a small dog named Robert, an arrogant photographer who will personally select one of An's paintings to be incinerated on the last day. She arrives to find California burning with wildfires while the foundation remains eerily calm, sponsors demanding their businesses appear in her work, and Robert judging everything she makes. Yun Ko-Eun writes satire that stays funny even when it's drawing blood. The art world's absurdities — patronage as control, destruction as spectacle, the artist as performing animal — are rendered with surgical comic timing. Art on Fire is a novel about what happens when the people funding your art also get to burn it.
