The Brooklyn Rail

In 1979, a twenty-eight-year-old Theresa Hak Kyung Cha returned to her native South Korea to produce a series of unfinished films, writings, and script notations focusing on the haunted remnants of the Japanese occupation of that country during World War II. These fragmentary works were to be part of a multimedia presentation titled White Dust from Mongolia, never completed but partially preserved in fragmentary texts, ephemera, and grainy film captures, many of which have been digitized into a thirty-minute recording included in this retrospective exhibition curated by Victoria Sung. Stark and enigmatic, these black-and-white sequences of mostly depopulated urban spaces echo the concluding montage in Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1962 film L’Eclisse, not to mention other films like Alain Robbe-Grillet’s Last Year at Marienbad (1961). Here, we see Cha highlighting the way that didactic denotations start to collapse under the weight of disquieting connotations lurking in historical shadows, slyly alluding to the fact that twenty-five years after the end of the Korean conflict, South Korea was again governed by a US-backed military dictatorship. Because she was murdered in New York in 1982, Cha did not live long enough to see the final dissolution of that government (in 1986), although she was keenly sympathetic with the hundreds of students who were massacred by the Korean government in Gwangju in 1980.

Many of the works presented in this exhibition can be read as poetic gestures of sympathy and solidarity with the turbulent political situation in South Korea throughout the 1970s and 1980s. This is evident in the documentation of a 1975 performance titled Aveugle Voix, consisting of a blindfold and eight large photographs of the artist dressed in ceremonial white clothing, struggling to summon the necessary language to meet a conflicted moment earmarked by the blinding forces of omnipresent censorship. Certainly, part of this has to do with the common struggles inherent in learning a new language, but it also explores the politicized limits of permissible utterance. The same can be said about her final completed work, Exilée (1980), an installation making combined use of film and video projection.

Cha was born in Busan at the mid-point of the Korean conflict, and her family immigrated to the United States in 1962. In 1969, she landed in the Practice of Art Department at the University of California, Berkeley, where she earned four degrees throughout the ensuing decade, including one in comparative literature, during which she was exposed to the writings of French theorists like Christian Metz and Roland Barthes. In 1976, she did a study-abroad semester in Paris to study with Metz. Given that much of Cha’s later works reflect film semiotics, we should not underestimate the extent of that influence, reaching back to the time when she was a student worker at the Pacific Film Archive.  

The earliest works in this exhibition are ceramics, including a Moon Jar (1973) bespeaking Cha’s involvement with traditional Korean forms. She worked closely with faculty member Jim Melchert, whose own path from ceramic sculpture to a wide-ranging conceptual, performance, and intermedia practice influenced Cha’s own artistic evolution. Melchert mentored Cha throughout most of her career, introducing her to Bay Area conceptual artists like Terry Fox and Reese Williams and to nonprofit exhibition spaces like 63 Bluxome and 80 Langton. 

Multiple Offerings includes various language projects that superficially resemble Concrete poetry executed in English, French, and Korean. In these works, something else was at play, however, something disquieting and ineffable, using language to show how things unsaid exert a powerful and destabilizing influence on the things that might be said. This is certainly true with Cha’s book of semi-autobiographical prose poems titled Dictée, originally published in 1982 and republished as a companion to Multiple Offerings. A copy of the original version of Dictée is exhibited in a vitrine, along with other, mostly fragmentary, writings and typescript ephemera, lurking like mysterious breadcrumbs leading to and beyond other breadcrumbs. Viewers can be forgiven for reading these textual fragments in the way that Jacques Lacan described when he wrote that “creative subjectivity has not ceased in its struggle to renew the never-exhausted power of symbols in the human exchange that brings them to the light of day.” For Cha, this leads to the crucial point where artist, artwork, and viewer merge with one another, opening on to the expanding polyvalence of sheer intertextuality.