More than 40 years after the death of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (1951-82), the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) is mounting the first survey of her work in more than two decades. The multi-disciplinary artist, whose oeuvre includes concrete poetry, mail art, textiles, ceramics, performance and film, is chiefly known today for Dictée, an artist book published shortly before her death in 1982. The exhibition Theresa Hak Kyung Cha: Multiple Offerings aims to present a more complete overview of Cha’s achievements.
“Part of what I’m trying to do in this exhibition is to de-emphasise Dictée,” says the curator Victoria Sung. Together with the curatorial associate Tausif Noor, Sung has drawn on the institution’s substantial holdings of Cha’s art and archives. Sung’s focus is less on completed works and more on the fluidity of Cha’s practice. “I wanted to honour Cha’s way of making,” Sung says, “to show how she would rethink themes over and over again, in different forms, so that one idea in the early 1970s is revisited in the early 1980s.”
One aspect Cha regularly returned to was words and text. “Language is the common denominator,” she asserted in 1979, enriched by her fluency in Korean, English and French, and shaped by her family’s history of moving between countries during and after the Second World War.
Engaging with the diaspora
Born in Busan, South Korea, in 1951, Cha emigrated to Hawaii in 1962, then to the Bay Area of San Francisco in 1964, where she later attended UC Berkeley, taking four undergraduate and graduate degrees in art and comparative literature. She became a US citizen in 1977.
“Cha was one of the first artists to really engage with diaspora, especially in the US context,” Sung says. “She was thinking through the enduring effects of dislocation through the mutability of language, history and memory, but she was doing this 50 years ago.”
In Multiple Offerings, Cha’s 1980 film Exilée will be recreated in a room-sized installation in which flickering reels of Super 8 films of photography serve up shadowy scenes devoid of people, and the word exilée (exiled) is reduced to an “X” in black ink.
Although there is only one Cha performance captured on film, Réveillé dans la Brume (awakened in the mist, 1977), the artist’s documentation, graphic scores, props, notes and sketches evoke their general character. The stencilled fabric banners that she unfurled in Aveugle Voix (blind voice, 1975) and the wrappers that gag her mouth, inscribed with the French word for “blind”, and her eyes, inscribed with the French word for “voice”, will be shown alongside photographs of the artist performing.
A significant difference between this show and BAMPFA’s 2001 survey will be Cha’s early explorations in weaving and ceramics, which have never been seen in public before. Her mentors at Berkeley, particularly Jim Melchert and the conceptual artist Terry Fox, encouraged Cha’s move towards a more process-based art, but these clay vessels and textiles demonstrate Cha’s feeling for texture. Melchert and Fox’s work will join those of eight other artists, which will be dispersed throughout the galleries. The presence of this artistic community, and the programmed three-hour reading of Dictée, are testimony to the Cha’s enduring legacy.
• Theresa Hak Kyung Cha: Multiple Offerings, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, 24 January-19 April
