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The White Book feels as if it is being whispered: each paragraph seems to come from some deep and interior place Han Kang wrote it whilst living in Warsaw, though in the book the city is never named explicitly Instead it is only a white city, white for its snow and white for its stone ruins In an interview with Granta, Kang said that when writing this book, she imagined her prematurely dead sister had lived and visited the city ‘in my place’   Photographs are interspersed throughout In some, a woman appears, her face obscured by shadow In others, only her hands are visible She holds a child’s gown She holds a pebble-like object covered in salt The photographs are of white objects, but in contrast to the white pages, they are startlingly grey The specks and splashes of whiteness are surrounded by shadow The woman seems trapped in darkness Who is this woman supposed to represent? The narrator? The ghost of the sister? The novelist Kang? All or none of the above?  The literal answer is that they are photographs of a performance by Kang, shot by the photographer Choi Jinhyuk But within the pages, they seem to carry the spirit of characters — and the novelist herself   The text is a loose collection of thoughts, scenes, and images Few are longer than a page They are gathered into three sections — ‘I’, ‘She’, and ‘All Whiteness’ ‘I’ follows the narrator considering the colour white and describes her sister’s passing ‘She’ imagines the sister’s life Some subsections describe what the sister might have done—having an X-ray, finding a pebble, attempting to befriend a dog Others contemplate white things—seagulls, a dead butterfly, a lace curtain   Both ‘I’ and ‘She’ are pensive and slightly sorrowful At first, this similarity is disorienting: it is hard to see where one perspective ends and the other begins Slowly, the reader realises that this muddling is the point The concern of the narrator is not whether the sister would have been a vastly different person, but what it means to replace one life with another Her mother would not have

The memorial for the artist was as inconclusive as her work, or anybody’s life Organised haphazardly on Facebook by one of her old friends, it was held beside the ‘lake’ in Echo Park in the middle of a heat wave on a summer Sunday afternoon For an hour after the appointed time, ten or twelve of us sat around in thin wedges of shade waiting to see if others would show up But no one did  — Chris Kraus, What I Couldn’t Write, 2016   While Julie Becker’s death rites were sparsely attended in 2016, the ICA’s 2018 summer retrospective of her work was one of many, much-discussed tributes in the UK to the art of dead young women In May, Tate Liverpool mounted a bumper anniversary show of Francesca Woodman’s ‘intimate’ portraits, alongside the work of fellow doomed youth Egon Schiele By the time of its close in November, the V&A’s display of Frida Kahlo’s paintings, together with her clothes, make-up and prosthetic leg, will have been consumed by visitors in the hundreds of thousands This summer, almost fifty years since Linda Nochlin raised and responded to the question: Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?, viewers have had ample opportunity to gorge on the artwork of consecrated women A current problem seems to have less to do with a lack of women artists, or their invisibility, and more with the predominant status of these women as dead and, often, dead young   From the Guardian to the Daily Mail, critics expressed resounding displeasure with the V&A’s ‘excessive adoration of a dead woman’s stuff’ borne out in its brazen display of ‘more pill bottles than paintings’ in its Kahlo exhibition In the Guardian, Jonathan Jones found the decision to co-cast Woodman and Schiele on the basis of their shared premature demise to be ‘so shallow and patronising that it suggests Tate Liverpool has lost all respect for its audience’ We, the audience, are left only to ponder our facile, morbid attraction, both to these artists and to their ‘stuff’   In the disproportion of dead-to-living women on show, there is an element