Greater than 40 years after the dying of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (1951-82), the Berkeley Artwork Museum and Pacific Movie Archive (BAMPFA) is mounting the primary survey of her work in additional than 20 years. The multi-disciplinary artist, whose oeuvre consists of concrete poetry, mail artwork, textiles, ceramics, efficiency and movie, is mainly recognized at this time for Dictée, an artist e book revealed shortly earlier than her dying in 1982. The exhibition Theresa Hak Kyung Cha: A number of Choices goals to current a extra full overview of Cha’s achievements.
“A part of what I’m making an attempt to do on this exhibition is to de-emphasise Dictée,” says the curator Victoria Sung. Along with the curatorial affiliate Tausif Noor, Sung has drawn on the establishment’s substantial holdings of Cha’s artwork and archives. Sung’s focus is much less on accomplished works and extra on the fluidity of Cha’s observe. “I wished to honour Cha’s manner of creating,” Sung says, “to point out how she would rethink themes time and again, in several varieties, in order that one concept within the early Seventies is revisited within the early Nineteen Eighties.”
One facet Cha frequently returned to was phrases and textual content. “Language is the widespread denominator,” she asserted in 1979, enriched by her fluency in Korean, English and French, and formed by her household’s historical past of shifting between international locations throughout and after the Second World Struggle.
Partaking with the diaspora
Born in Busan, South Korea, in 1951, Cha emigrated to Hawaii in 1962, then to the Bay Space of San Francisco in 1964, the place she later attended UC Berkeley, taking 4 undergraduate and graduate levels in artwork and comparative literature. She grew to become a US citizen in 1977.
“Cha was one of many first artists to essentially interact with diaspora, particularly within the US context,” Sung says. “She was considering by way of the enduring results of dislocation by way of the mutability of language, historical past and reminiscence, however she was doing this 50 years in the past.”
In A number of Choices, Cha’s 1980 movie Exilée shall be recreated in a room-sized set up through which flickering reels of Tremendous 8 movies of images serve up shadowy scenes devoid of individuals, and the phrase exilée (exiled) is lowered to an “X” in black ink.
Though there is just one Cha efficiency captured on movie, Réveillé dans la Brume (woke up within the mist, 1977), the artist’s documentation, graphic scores, props, notes and sketches evoke their common character. The stencilled material banners that she unfurled in Aveugle Voix (blind voice, 1975) and the wrappers that gag her mouth, inscribed with the French phrase for “blind”, and her eyes, inscribed with the French phrase for “voice”, shall be proven alongside pictures of the artist performing.
A big distinction between this present and BAMPFA’s 2001 survey shall be Cha’s early explorations in weaving and ceramics, which have by no means been seen in public earlier than. Her mentors at Berkeley, notably Jim Melchert and the conceptual artist Terry Fox, inspired Cha’s transfer in the direction of a extra process-based artwork, however these clay vessels and textiles display Cha’s feeling for texture. Melchert and Fox’s work will be a part of these of eight different artists, which shall be dispersed all through the galleries. The presence of this inventive neighborhood, and the programmed three-hour studying of Dictée, are testimony to the Cha’s enduring legacy.
• Theresa Hak Kyung Cha: A number of Choices, Berkeley Artwork Museum and Pacific Movie Archive, Berkeley, 24 January-19 April
