“It’s Still Incredibly Relevant”: The Pioneering Art of Teresa Hak Kyung Cha | art

IIf there’s one thing the late avant-garde artist Teresa Hak Kyung Cha is known for, it’s almost certainly her 1982 experimental book Dictation, a hard-to-classify work that has become a mainstay of college curricula and aspiring writers. Poet Juliana Spar described the work as “part autobiography, part autobiography, part personal memoir, part ethnography, part autoethnography, part translation,” noting that it brings together “multiple voices—American, European, Asian—so as to construct history.”

A major new retrospective of Cha at the Berkeley Art Museum — “Theresa Hak Kyung Cha: Multiple Shows” — aims to go beyond “Dictée” to present the artist’s diverse and astonishing output, drawing attention to her full complexity as a creative force and the many contemporary thinkers who have drawn inspiration from her career.

“I wanted to put Dictée in one place,” Victoria Song, the exhibition’s curator, told me during an interview at the Berkeley Art Museum. “Of course it’s a big part of her practice, but it’s one of the last works she did, and I wanted to show the real richness of her practice from the early 1970s onward.”

Cha originally published Dictation with Tanam Press in the fall of 1982, shortly before she was raped and murdered by a security guard in Manhattan. Born in South Korea in 1951, Cha and her family immigrated to the United States when she was 12 years old. The family found its way to the Bay Area, where Cha became an outstanding student, eventually earning four separate degrees at UC Berkeley, working at the Berkeley Art Museum and becoming a fixture in the Northern California avant-garde art scene throughout the 1970s.

The Berkeley Art Museum became home to Cha Arts and Archives in 1992, after an exhibition of her work inspired her heirs to donate materials to that institution. Subsequent shows of Cha’s work took place during the 1990s, particularly at the Whitney Museum in New York, with the first major retrospective in 2001 at the Berkeley Art Museum. According to Song, another major retrospective has been scheduled for a long time.

“She was interacting with expatriates in an interesting way that not many artists did at the time,” Song said. “She was bringing her body, her language, her memory, her family history, her cultural heritage, the untranslatable—and she was engaging with all of these themes in the 1970s and 1980s. Only today can artists and audiences catch up with the work she was making. It still feels incredibly relevant and contemporary.”

“Multiple Views” goes back to Cha’s beginnings, beginning with the pottery she made as an art student at UC Berkeley and her early work “Mouth to Mouth,” a video that shows an extreme close-up of Cha pronouncing the vowels of the Korean language. Cha has been exploring her fascination with how the sounds of language are translated into meaning, as well as the idea of ​​displacement, a central theme in her career. According to Song, coming to the United States and learning English as a teenager prompted Cha to think about aspects of the language that most people take for granted.

“She was able to think through language from a more detached point of view because she was learning it later in life,” Song said. “This was something she was very aware of – she had her own understanding of what it was to learn a language and be able to speak or not.”

Multiple performances feature several film and video clips, including Permutations, probably Cha’s most famous work after Dictée, and Exilée, a simultaneous film and video installation. The show also gives ample space to artistic responses to Cha’s work, among them “Pretend Now” by black queer artist L. Franklin Gilliam, a video that explores the intersection of identity, self-presentation, and the enactment of race, and Chilean artist Cecilia Vicuña’s “Dream of Rain with Sound,” a sound installation that praises Cha and comes to terms with her murder in the broader context of violence against women. In the piece, Vicuña sadly recalls: “I was about to meet her when she was murdered. / I was a few blocks away, with other heretical women, but her scream did not reach us. / We could not hear the cry coming from the souls of all the raped women. / The scream that became a wave, a wave of grief asking us to stop / The next crime.”

Bringing in the work of other artists is part of the purpose of the multiple shows, to illustrate how much Cha’s work has resonated with artists in the decades since her death. In her position as curator of contemporary art, Song has witnessed Cha become a vital presence permeating artistic culture. “I think it’s very rare for an artist to have such a huge impact on so many different younger generations of artists working in so many different ways,” Song said. “Hence the momentum of the exhibition.”

The multiple performances also present Cha as a true creative force, someone who found her artistic calling early in life and seemed to pursue it with absolute confidence. “It’s very clear that she was very serious as an artist from a very early stage,” Song said. “I believed in art wholeheartedly from the beginning.” A series of photographs documenting her 1975 performance piece A Ble Wail—taken by Cha when she was in her early twenties—show one artist courageously taking control of her Worth Ryder art gallery. Her written description of the performance boldly declares her intention: “In this piece, I want to be the audience’s dream.” Another set of photos documents an untitled performance in 1974, in which Cha burned 10-foot-high sheets of paper on which she wrote single words. “Not everyone is going to do this kind of thing,” Song said. “She was very serious and had a wonderful confidence.”

As much as Cha was a prodigy, multiple displays also document how the UCLA campus and the Berkeley Art Museum provided much inspiration for her creativity. “The Department of Arts Practice has been very open in its teaching methods,” Song said. “Jim Melchert talks about how he encourages his sculpture students to treat the UCLA campus as their studio. Cha used fibers and twigs she collected from campus in her weaving.” Through the museum, I was also able to participate deeply in the Bay Area’s avant-garde art scene, which Song describes as one of artists investing themselves fully in each other’s creative lives and enjoying a scene of profound creative fluidity. “They were experimenting and experimenting with different forms of manufacturing for each other at a time when nothing was really set in stone,” Song said. “The Bay Area has really been a hub for performing conceptual arts and working outside of institutional spaces.”

To stand inside the multiple show galleries is to feel the inspiration that comes from the excitement and openness of an art world that in many ways seems so far removed from today, a world in which a Korean immigrant can spend nearly a decade at a public university and make art that no one has ever seen before. Song intends “Multiple Shows” to be a revelation for audiences, showing them how Cha transcends the boundaries that define the art world—and that they can likewise open their minds. “I wanted to dissolve boundaries as much as I could, because she’s not an artist who thinks that way,” Song said. “Her practice was really very open, and so I hope it just signals an openness for artists and researchers and other students and people who are interested in learning and want to participate.”