Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Art Speaks in a Language Left for Us to Translate

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha was an artist never satisfied with one mode of art-making, she flitted between mediums, selecting whichever best reflect her preoccupations: the traces of history, the movement of people in exile and diaspora, and the slippery nature of language in just one way. In her hands, no concept feels definitive or fixed; rather, these weighty ideas are always fluid, ever adapting to the moment—even now, four decades after her untimely death.

Cha’s distinctive approach is perhaps best illustrated by Dictée, a short volume that merges poetry, memoir, calligraphy, and the hagiography of revolutionary women like Joan of Arc, Yu Gwan-sun, and her mother Hyun Soon Huo. Published in the fall of 1982, just weeks before her murder, Dictée cemented Cha as a singular voice whose words could resonate with readers from even beyond the ether. In the decades since, it has become an essential text in academic fields ranging from comparative literature to Asian American studies.

More recently, her oeuvre, particularly her filmic work, has gained renewed attention from the art world, following a memorable presentation dedicated to Cha at the 2022 Whitney Biennial. And in recent years, contemporary artists, including Na Mira and Cici Wu, have since dug into her archives to create new work that seemingly continues where Cha left off.

Meanwhile, the institutional steward of her art and archives, the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archives (BAMPFA), opened this winter the most comprehensive retrospective of Cha to date , titled “Multiple Offerings,” which closes Sunday. Not only has Cha not had an exhibition of this scale in 25 years, but the interest in her work has also drastically increased: three-quarters of all research requests to BAMPFA’s holdings are related to Cha. In the works for three years, the exhibition also spurred a massive effort to re-catalog BAMPFA’s entire Cha collection and archive, which numbers around 26,000 objects.

The show takes its name from the open-ended conceptual framework Cha applied to her practice- “Multiple Telling with Multiple Offerings”, as she described it—in which viewers were invited to create new meaning via how they experience the art.

The exhibition, expertly curated by Victoria Sung, is expansive and wide-ranging, poignantly invoking Cha’s spirit in the galleries. Over 100 works by Cha are paired with pieces by 10 other artists, an intergenerational mix of Cha’s mentors, contemporaries, and artists generations younger who have been influenced by Cha’s her disparate practice.

The exhibition begins by invoking the Cha family via Untitled (Poem to Mother and Father), an ink on cloth work from the 1970s written in the Korean sijo poetic form, installed at the entrance. Cha’s family was central not only to her art-making, as her siblings were often collaborators, but also to the preservation of her legacy: they made multiple donations of Cha’s work to BAMPFA, beginning in 1992. She stamped the corner of Untitled (Poem) with her thumb print in red ink, a way to mark her lineage. In the poem, she thanks her parents for giving her life, raising her, and making her life as an artist possible. She ends with a question, one that speaks to the familial relationships that animate this exhibition and her legacy more broadly, “Where could I ever repay them / for their loving kindness, infinite as the sky?”

The exhibition traces Cha’s career mostly chronologically, focusing on the geographic nodes of where she lived and worked between 1969 and 1982, starting with the decade she spent at UC Berkeley, which houses BAMPFA, where she earned four degrees. Later, it moves to her time spent in France and New York, as well as her return to South Korea, which she left in 1962 when she was 12.

Even Cha’s early works in more traditional mediums point toward how her practice would evolve in the coming years. As a young undergraduate, she made work at Peter Voulkos’s ceramic studio, located on Berkeley’s Shattuck Avenue. One work produced in his studio and on view at BAMPFA is clearly influenced by the Bay Areas ceramics scene of the late 1960s and early ’70s—a mix of funky and formal. But still, Cha has added her own twist by incorporating elements of traditional Korean dal hangari (moon jars).

Such inspirations might not be immediately legible to most visitors, but that is part of what makes Cha’s art thrilling to this day: with a little research, aspects of her art reveal itself, while other elements remain forever unknowable. Cha reveled in that space of uncertainty—and if visitors open themselves that realm, they may find comfort there.

This comes through clearest in the vitrines displaying her artist statements, as well as performance scores, production notes, and poems. Cha is at her best when she questions the nature of language, unspooling it letter by letter.

Take her script for Monologue (1977) which begins, “what if / i say / this / in saying that / for lack of a better word,” or Repetitive Pattern (1975), in which the words “repetitive” and “pattern” are repeated until they lose meaning. It Is Almost That (1977), a suite of 19 sheets that served as a maquette for a slide projection work, features various compositions of words, often in the form of sentence diagrams: the words “YOU” and “ME,” for example, appear on opposite sides of a line that slashes through a circle, while other sheets play with first, second, and third person.

But Cha’s work wasn’t simply art for art’s sake. Her 1975 performance Aveugle Voix—the title translates literally to “blind voice” from French, but when read phonetically can mean “the blind sees,” according to a wall text—is one early example. Cha performed the work on the Berkeley campus dressed in all white, and blind-folded with a piece of cloth printed with the titular words. She then unspooled a banner that read, in part, “WORDS FAIL ME,” evoking the early resistance to Japan’s occupation of Korea in the early 20th century as a way to connect it to her present of anti-war protests and student-led strikes at Berkeley which advocated for the establishment of ethnic studies departments.

Cha’s action “expose the limits of speech and the politics of who is allowed to speak,” per a wall text. The message feels salient today, when protests on college campuses, including those against the genocide in Gaza, are routinely silenced and forcibly disbanded by police or campus security, and some participating students have faced censure or even expulsion.

“Multiple Offerings” is dense with video works, some of which are digestible after just a few minutes of observations, while others reveal their depths slowly after repeated viewings. In many of these works, Cha extends her inquiry to the slipperiness of language by adding in the element of time.

Permutations (1976), one of Cha’s best-known works in the medium, does just this. Over the course of 10 minutes, we see the artist’s sister, Bernadette, in a series of six different one-second shots—“head facing the camera with eyes closed,” “the background wall,” or “head back to the camera with eyes open,” according to the directions listed in her notes for the work—that are configured via a Cagean approach of chance operations. Bernadette stares blankly at the camera, and then she turns her back to you. Are her eyes open or close? The sense of refusal here on the part of both Bernadette and Cha, who inserts her own face for one second toward the end, is key to making this work difficult to parse, even when it seems so simple.

Cha never completed what was her likely to be her magnum opus, the feature-length film White Dust from Mongolia (1980). Her archive, however, includes extensive notes and storyboards, outlining what would have been a telling of life in Korea during the Japanese occupation, which by 1980, was still an under-studied chapter of history. Cha apparently planned to present a fictionalized version of the life stories of her parents, who as children lived in Japanese-controlled Manchuria, where they were forbidden from speaking Korean.

Her parents’ story, followed by Cha’s own experience of learning English after immigrating to the US, had a profound influence on her. “The content of my work,” she writes in an application for a UC postdoctoral fellowship, “has been the realization of the imprint, the inscription etched from the experience of leaving, the experience of America. It has served as both shadow and reflection in my work and myself as an individual.”

Cha’s descriptions for the film describe two distinct narratives that eventually form a “final conversion” into “one complete superimposition, to one point in Time,” according to the fellowship application. But as artist Na Mira says in a conversation with Cici Wu about the work, published in the accompanying catalog, “White Dust held everything and nothing of Cha’s practice, and the only way for me to engage with it was never to finish; it was to continue, in fragmentation.”

That Cha’s career was cut short leaves her potential unknowable. But by spending time with her art, viewers are reminded that the remnants of life and of history—of a life and of a history—are ours to piece together. Cha suggests as much in one letter that comprises Audience Distant Relative (1977–78), titled “object/subject”:

                  in our relationship
                  i am the object / you are the subject

                  in our relationship
                  you are the object / i am the subject