Theresa Hak Kyung Cha


Theresa Hak Kyung Cha was an American novelist, producer, director, and artist of South Korean origin, best known for her 1982 novel, Dictee. Cha was considered to be an avant-garde artist. Cha was fluent in Korean, English, and French. In her works, such as Dictee, Cha took language apart and experimented with it in her writing. Cha's interdisciplinary background was clearly evident in Dictee, which experiments with juxtaposition and hypertext of both print and visual media. Cha's Dictee is taught in contemporary literature classes including women's literature.
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's novel Dictee was published in 1982. She was murdered on November 5, 1982, a week after her novel was published.

Early life

Cha, a Korean American, was born in Busan, South Korea during the Korean War. She was the middle child of five to Hyung Sang and Hyung Soon Cha. Both of her parents were teachers. Her mother and oldest brother left Korea for Hawaii when Cha was young, in 1962. The rest of her family eventually moved to the United States in 1963, temporarily settling in Hawaii. A year later, in 1964, Cha's family relocated to the San Francisco Bay Area, where she attended Convent of the Sacred Heart High School in San Francisco. During her time at Sacred Heart High School, Cha studied French. Cha was fluent in French, English and Korean.

Education

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha attended a private Catholic high school, Convent of the Sacred Heart High School, in San Francisco. At this school Cha studied Western classics and language. She also studied French, Greek, and Roman classics. During her time at Sacred Heart, she sang in the choir. It is thought that Cha's time at Sacred Heart inspired Dictee. By the time she graduated Cha had earned many scholastic awards.
Before committing to Berkeley, Cha attended University of San Francisco for one semester. She transferred to University of California, Berkeley the following year, where she completed her studies in art and writing. There, she also studied ceramics with Peter Voulkos and James Melchert, who encouraged her to work in performance. As a student, she became close friends with Dennis Love, another student, and Bertrand Augst, a professor of French and comparative literature. Her classes with Augst inspired Cha to study comparative literature, in which she later earned degrees. Teachers and friends have stated that Cha enjoyed reading broadly, anything from Korean poetry to European modernist and postmodern literature. Cha received her B.A. in comparative literature in 1973 and a B.A. in art in 1975, both from Berkeley. She worked as a student employee of the Pacific Film Archive for three years between 1974 and 1977 while earning two graduate degrees in art.
As a graduate student, she became close friends with Mechert and even became his teaching assistant in 1976. During this time, Cha connected with fellow artists Stephen Laub, Reese Williams, Young Soon Min, and Mark Thompson. As Cha's interest in film grew, she studied at Berkeley under Bertrand Augst, who recalls her interest in poetry written by Stéphane Mallarmé and plays by Samuel Beckett. According to Augst, Cha felt an affinity with Mallarmé's associative and restrained use of language. It is likely these artists introduced her to unconventional typographic design which become a constant feature of her works. Beckett's highly reductive style of theater found echoes in the spare setting of Cha's performances. More than the stylistic influence of Beckett or Mallarmé, Cha's studies of film theory with Augst had perhaps the greatest effect on her development. Augst taught his students structural and semiological film analysis, frequently using an Athena projector, which can slow a film to a single frame. This frame-by-frame study greatly inspired Cha's own films and use of video stills. In 1976 Cha decided to pursue a degree in film theory at the UC Education Abroad Program, Centre d'Etudes Americain du Cinema, in Paris. During her stay she studied under Jean-Louis Baudry, Raymond Bellour, Monique Wittig, and Christian Metz.

Career and personal life

Cha began her career as a performance artist, producer, director, and writer in 1974. She also worked as an usher and cashier from 1974 to 1977 at the Pacific Film Archive, with friends.
In 1979 Cha traveled back to Korea for the first time in seventeen years. She had long expressed great anticipation to return in her book Exilée, where she describes the flight in terms of the sixteen time zones that separate San Francisco from Seoul. It was a sorrowful but memorable trip. The excitement of finally returning to her homeland was diminished by the cool reception she received from her own people, to whom she was just another foreigner. "...she visited Korea with her brother in the midst of massive student demonstrations, only to learn that she was a stranger at home." Cha performed "Other Things Seen, Other Things Heard" at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1979, attracting the attention of Robert Atkins, art critic for the San Francisco Bay Guardian.
In August 1980, Cha moved to New York City, working as an editor and writer for Tanam Press. Earlier that year, she also traveled to Japan and then back to Korea, this time working on the film White Dust From Mongolia from May to July 1980 with her brother. They were never able to finish the film due to the dangerous political situation in Korea at the time. South Korea President Park Chung Hee had just been assassinated that previous May and restrictive new laws had been declared. Cha and her brother were harassed by South Korean officials who thought they might be North Korean spies. In 1981, Cha began teaching video art at Elizabeth Seton College while working in the design department of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She was awarded an artist's residence at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in 1982.
While some authors have described Cha's character as ambitious and disciplined, others have described her as undisciplined, tragic, pure, and intelligent. Cha married the photographer Richard Barnes in May 1982; the two had met in a drawing class in 1975, during her time at UC Berkeley.

Style

Themes

From 1910 to 1945, the Korean language was forbidden to be communicated in Korea under Japanese rule. Cha linked her own process of learning language - whether that be in her Korean first language, English, French or Latin - to the extraordinary cultural oppression experienced in Korea during this nearly 40-year period. In the body of Cha's art, language functions as fluid binary systems of contemporaneous displacement and reunification, repression and freedom, detachment and engagement, and the ineffable and communication. The main body of Cha's work is "looking for the roots of language before it is born on the tip of the tongue". Much of Cha's work demonstrates an interaction and interplay between languages with her primary focus on "grammatical structures of a language, syntax, how words and meaning are constructed in the language system itself, by function or usage, and how transformation is brought about through manipulation, processes as changing the syntax, isolation, removing from context, repetition, and reduction to minimal units".
Since language unified Cha's aesthetic approach, establishing an intimate dialogue with the audience was a deliberate consideration in her art. The audience held a "privileged place in that She/He is the receptor and or activator central to an exchange or dialogue". For Cha, the audience is the "Other" whose presence establishes, or completes, any form of communication. As she writes in "audience distant relative":
There was no firm delineation between Cha's visual and linguistic approaches to literature and art. Her visual and performance work often involved words and letters manipulated such as changing the sizes and placement of letters. These words are often imposed on or near images as a form of communication, another theme in Cha's work.
Dictee features heavily French language and English, along with others, often together on the same page. Commonly the languages are used in repetitive, "broken" phrases and frequent code-switching, similar to the communication of an individual learning the languages. According to Hyun Yi Kang, this style causes readers to " the arbitrary and ideologically colored prescriptions on language and writing, challenging the requirements of good speech and correct grammar."
Other common themes in Cha's work include diaspora, the mother tongue, and the narrative device of stream of consciousness.

Influences

Cha was influenced by a variety of sources. Her friends say that she was inspired by the art activity around her, but there has been little analysis of this aspect of her development as an artist. Cha was inspired by artist Terry Fox, a fellow artist and performer. She met him in 1973, during one of his solo exhibitions at the UAM, now Art, Design & Architecture Museum at UCSB. Cha came to his performances and watched Fox and his brother Larry interact with various materials and objects, such as metal and a mirror. Fox's exhibit involved a variety of media and formats, including performance, sculpture, and drawing. Cha drew her inspiration from Fox's slow, ritualistic performances. The translucent veil employed by Fox to demarcate and isolate his performance space was a device Cha used in her performances ″A Ble Wail″ and Pause Still. Cha also used props—candles, bamboo sticks, flour—in some of her performance, which Fox had previously used in his own. Cha and Fox have been compared in similar slow, deliberate, almost trance-like paces they employed in their performance work. Fox had witnessed a few of Cha's performances and commented on the way she moved in the space, barefoot, not making a sound. During her time as an usher Cha became interested in the work of Marguerite Duras, Jean-Luc Godard, Alain Resnais, Yasujirō Ozu, and many other film theorists and artists. Carl Dreyer was a particularly recurrent influence, particularly his film The Passion of Joan of Arc, which was quoted in Cha's super-8 and video installation Exilée among other instances in her work.
In the visual arts, her work has been included in the expanded account of conceptual art initiated by the exhibition Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s–1980s, in addition her work usually features in the San Francisco Bay-area accounts of conceptual art, the dates of which are later than the East Coast accounts. Lawrence Rinder notes that San Francisco Bay-area conceptualism of the 1970s also ‘tended to invest conceptual forms with personal and physical qualities.’

Death

On November 5, 1982, Cha was raped and murdered by security guard and serial rapist Joey Sanza in New York City, in The Puck Building on Lafayette Street in lower Manhattan. She had gone there to meet Barnes, who was documenting the renovation of the building. She died a week after the publication of Dictee. Sanza, who was already imprisoned in Florida for 12 counts of sexual battery committed between January and June 1982 when he was indicted for the rape and murder of Cha in 1983, was convicted on those charges in 1987 after the third trial.
Shortly before her death, Cha was working on an artistic piece for a group show at Artists Space in SoHo. The Artists Space exhibit later became a memorial for Cha after her death by exhibiting images and text from Dictee. Additional work left incomplete at the time of her death included another film, a book, a critique of advertising, and a piece on the representation of hands in Western painting.

Legacy

In 1991, nine years following Cha's murder, her brother and director of the Theresa Hak Kyung Cha Memorial Foundation, John Cha, asked if the University of California Berkeley Art Museum would be able to set up safe-keeping of Cha's videos, artwork, and archives. The gift was accepted by the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive in 1992. Some of Cha's work is available through the Electronic Arts Intermix.
Today Dictee is widely studied in contemporary literature classes, including classes on avant-garde writing, feminist literature, and Asian American literature.
Elvan Zabunyan wrote the first monograph of Cha's work and published it in 2013.

Exhibitions

Cha's first professional exhibition was part of a group show in 1980 at the San Francisco Art Institute Annual. A posthumous showing of Cha's work was organized by her friend Judith Barry and exhibited at Artists Space a month after her death. Her first solo exhibition was held at the Whitney Museum in 1993 with little publicity.
Catalogued in the book of the same name, an exhibition of Cha's work entitled The Dream of the Audience: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha was organized and shown in 2001 at the University of California Berkeley Art Museum by senior curator Constance Lewallen. This exhibition, building off the work of two previously organized by former curator Lawrence Rinder, aimed to display lesser known work by Cha including other published works, videos, performances, works on paper, and mail art. The exhibit later went on tour, including stops in Irvine, New York City, Illinois, and Seattle, with a final stop in Seoul. The exhibition continued to Vienna and Barcelona.
Cha's work was exhibited again in Paris and London in 2013.
In 2018, BAMPFA staged an exhibition based on Cha's book Dictee entitled , organized by assistant curator Stephanie Cannizzo. The Cleveland Museum of Art also staged Cha's video work in a show entitled Theresa Hak Kyung Cha: Displacements in 2018.

Published works

Selected works distributed by Electronic Arts Intermix, Inc., New York
;Avant Dictee