Theresa Hak Kyung Cha was an artist by no means glad with one mode of art-making, she flitted between mediums, choosing whichever greatest mirror her preoccupations: the traces of historical past, the motion of individuals in exile and diaspora, and the slippery nature of language in only one method. In her palms, no idea feels definitive or mounted; fairly, these weighty concepts are all the time fluid, ever adapting to the second—even now, 4 many years after her premature dying.
Cha’s distinctive method is maybe greatest illustrated by Dictée, a brief quantity that merges poetry, memoir, calligraphy, and the hagiography of revolutionary girls like Joan of Arc, Yu Gwan-sun, and her mom Hyun Quickly Huo. Revealed within the fall of 1982, simply weeks earlier than her homicide, Dictée cemented Cha as a singular voice whose phrases might resonate with readers from even past the ether. Within the many years since, it has develop into an important textual content in educational fields starting from comparative literature to Asian American research.
Associated Articles
Extra not too long ago, her oeuvre, significantly her filmic work, has gained renewed consideration from the artwork world, following a memorable presentation devoted to Cha on the 2022 Whitney Biennial. And in recent times, modern artists, together with Na Mira and Cici Wu, have since dug into her archives to create new work that seemingly continues the place Cha left off.
In the meantime, the institutional steward of her artwork and archives, the Berkeley Artwork Museum and Pacific Movie Archives (BAMPFA), opened this winter probably the most complete retrospective of Cha so far , titled “A number of Choices,” which closes Sunday. Not solely has Cha not had an exhibition of this scale in 25 years, however the curiosity in her work has additionally drastically elevated: three-quarters of all analysis requests to BAMPFA’s holdings are associated to Cha. Within the works for 3 years, the exhibition additionally spurred a large effort to re-catalog BAMPFA’s total Cha assortment and archive, which numbers round 26,000 objects.
The present takes its identify from the open-ended conceptual framework Cha utilized to her practice- “A number of Telling with A number of Choices”, as she described it—through which viewers have been invited to create new that means by way of how they expertise the artwork.
The exhibition, expertly curated by Victoria Sung, is expansive and wide-ranging, poignantly invoking Cha’s spirit within the galleries. Over 100 works by Cha are paired with items by 10 different artists, an intergenerational mixture of Cha’s mentors, contemporaries, and artists generations youthful who’ve been influenced by Cha’s her disparate observe.
Cici Wu, Upon Leaving the White Mud, 2017/2018, set up view, “Theresa Hak Kyung Cha: A number of Choices,” 2026, at BAMPFA.
Photograph Chris Grunder
The exhibition begins by invoking the Cha household by way of Untitled (Poem to Mom and Father), an ink on fabric work from the Seventies written within the Korean sijo poetic type, put in on the entrance. Cha’s household was central not solely to her art-making, as her siblings have been typically collaborators, but in addition to the preservation of her legacy: they made a number of donations of Cha’s work to BAMPFA, starting in 1992. She stamped the nook of Untitled (Poem) along with her thumb print in crimson ink, a method to mark her lineage. Within the poem, she thanks her mother and father for giving her life, elevating her, and making her life as an artist potential. She ends with a query, one which speaks to the familial relationships that animate this exhibition and her legacy extra broadly, “The place might I ever repay them / for his or her loving kindness, infinite because the sky?”
The exhibition traces Cha’s profession principally chronologically, specializing in the geographic nodes of the place she lived and labored between 1969 and 1982, beginning with the last decade she spent at UC Berkeley, which homes BAMPFA, the place she earned 4 levels. Later, it strikes to her time spent in France and New York, in addition to her return to South Korea, which she left in 1962 when she was 12.
Set up view of “Theresa Hak Kyung Cha: A number of Choices,” 2026, at Berkeley Artwork Museum and Pacific Movie Archives, displaying Untitled (Poem to Mom and Father).
Photograph Chris Grunder
Even Cha’s early works in additional conventional mediums level towards how her observe would evolve within the coming years. As a younger undergraduate, she made work at Peter Voulkos’s ceramic studio, situated 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 Sixties and early ’70s—a mixture of funky and formal. However nonetheless, Cha has added her personal twist by incorporating components of conventional Korean dal hangari (moon jars).
Such inspirations won’t be instantly legible to most guests, however that’s a part of what makes Cha’s artwork thrilling to at the present time: with a little analysis, facets of her artwork reveal itself, whereas different components stay eternally unknowable. Cha reveled in that area of uncertainty—and if guests open themselves that realm, they could discover consolation there.
Set up view of “Theresa Hak Kyung Cha: A number of Choices,” 2026, at Berkeley Artwork Museum and Pacific Movie Archives, displaying her early ceramics (on desk) and documentation associated to Aveugle Voix (1975, background).
Photograph Chris Grunder
This comes by means of clearest within the vitrines displaying her artist statements, in addition to efficiency scores, manufacturing notes, and poems. Cha is at her greatest when she questions the character 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 greater phrase,” or Repetitive Sample (1975), through which the phrases “repetitive” and “sample” are repeated till they lose that means. It Is Nearly That (1977), a set of 19 sheets that served as a maquette for a slide projection work, options numerous compositions of phrases, typically within the type of sentence diagrams: the phrases “YOU” and “ME,” for instance, seem on reverse sides of a line that slashes by means of a circle, whereas different sheets play with first, second, and third individual.
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Repetitive Sample, 1975, set up view.
Photograph Chris Grunder
However Cha’s work wasn’t merely artwork for artwork’s sake. Her 1975 efficiency Aveugle Voix—the title interprets actually to “blind voice” from French, however when learn phonetically can imply “the blind sees,” in accordance with a wall textual content—is one early instance. Cha carried out the work on the Berkeley campus wearing all white, and blind-folded with a bit of material printed with the titular phrases. She then unspooled a banner that learn, partially, “WORDS FAIL ME,” evoking the early resistance to Japan’s occupation of Korea within the early twentieth century as a method to join it to her current of anti-war protests and student-led strikes at Berkeley which advocated for the institution of ethnic research departments.
Cha’s motion “expose the boundaries of speech and the politics of who’s allowed to talk,” per a wall textual content. The message feels salient at the moment, when protests on faculty campuses, together with these towards the genocide in Gaza, are routinely silenced and forcibly disbanded by police or campus safety, and a few collaborating college students have confronted censure and even expulsion.
“A number of Choices” is dense with video works, a few of that are digestible after only a few minutes of observations, whereas others reveal their depths slowly after repeated viewings. In lots of of those works, Cha extends her inquiry to the slipperiness of language by including within the aspect of time.
Set up view of “Theresa Hak Kyung Cha: A number of Choices,” 2026, at Berkeley Artwork Museum and Pacific Movie Archives, displaying Permutations (1976).
Photograph Chris Grunder
Permutations (1976), certainly one of Cha’s best-known works within the medium, does simply this. Over the course of 10 minutes, we see the artist’s sister, Bernadette, in a collection of six totally different one-second pictures—“head going through the digital camera with eyes closed,” “the background wall,” or “head again to the digital camera with eyes open,” in accordance with the instructions listed in her notes for the work—which might be configured by way of a Cagean method of probability operations. Bernadette stares blankly on the digital camera, after which she turns her again to you. Are her eyes open or shut? The sense of refusal right here on the a part of each Bernadette and Cha, who inserts her personal face for one second towards the tip, is vital to creating this work tough to parse, even when it appears so easy.
Cha by no means accomplished what was her more likely to be her magnum opus, the feature-length movie White Mud from Mongolia (1980). Her archive, nevertheless, consists of intensive notes and storyboards, outlining what would have been a telling of life in Korea throughout the Japanese occupation, which by 1980, was nonetheless an under-studied chapter of historical past. Cha apparently deliberate to current a fictionalized model of the life tales of her mother and father, who as kids lived in Japanese-controlled Manchuria, the place they have been forbidden from talking Korean.
Her mother and father’ story, adopted by Cha’s personal expertise of studying English after immigrating to the US, had a profound affect on her. “The content material of my work,” she writes in an utility for a UC postdoctoral fellowship, “has been the belief of the imprint, the inscription etched from the expertise of leaving, the expertise of America. It has served as each shadow and reflection in my work and myself as a person.”
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, White Mud From Mongolia (nonetheless), 1980.
BAMPFA, Reward of the Theresa Hak Kyung Cha Memorial Basis
Cha’s descriptions for the movie describe two distinct narratives that finally type a “remaining conversion” into “one full superimposition, to 1 level in Time,” in accordance with the fellowship utility. However as artist Na Mira says in a dialog with Cici Wu concerning the work, printed within the accompanying catalog, “White Mud held all the pieces and nothing of Cha’s observe, and the one method for me to interact with it was by no means to complete; it was to proceed, in fragmentation.”
That Cha’s profession was minimize quick leaves her potential unknowable. However by spending time along with her artwork, viewers are reminded that the remnants of life and of historical past—of a life and of a historical past—are ours to piece collectively. Cha suggests as a lot in a single letter that contains Viewers Distant Relative (1977–78), titled “object/topic”:
in our relationship
i’m the thing / you’re the topic
in our relationship
you’re the object / i’m the topic
