Third Woman Press
An interdisciplinary and boundary-breaking writer and artist, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha is best known for her exploration and embodiment of exile, grief, trauma, and voicelessness. Cha was born in Busan, South Korea in 1951 in the middle of the Korean War where they were under Japanese occupation and forbidden to speak Korean publicly in their own country. Uprooted during the Korean War, her family immigrated to America in 1962, moving first to Hawaii and then to San Francisco in 1946 where they had to learn English. In San Francisco, she attended a French-speaking Catholic high school (Wallack). This radical shift and overlap of cultures and languages indefinitely shaped her and her artwork that she created in years to come.
Cha entered the University of California at Berkeley in 1969, just in time for the student protest movement, with its sit-ins and riot police (Wallack). For Cha, who was born during the Korean War, the uproar in Northern California echoed the tumult of Korean history. The trauma of such experiences were influencers in the fragmentary stories she began to tell in her future. Her time in San Francisco was during the ascendance of French film theory and abstract literature on the Berkeley campus together with the rising feminist and other cultural movements (Wallack). The lively community of the 1970s San Francisco Bay Area undoubtedly affected the way she saw the world and documented it (Lewallen). Thus, along with her roots in French psychoanalytic film theory, far-ranging cultural and symbolic references from shamanism to Confucianism and Catholicism shaped her work. After years in the Bay Area and time in Europe, Cha moved to New York City in 1980. As an editor and writer at Tanam Press, she produced two well-known works, Dictée (1982) and Apparatus (1981), an important anthology of essays on the cinematic apparatus (EAI).
Dictée, her better-known work of the two, is “a classical work of autobiography that transcends the self,” a story of numerous women Cha documents and unites by “suffering and the transcendence of suffering” (Lewallen). By cleverly fabricating a montage of family photographs, maps, documents, images, texts diagrams, stories and prose poems, Dictée addresses interlaced themes of loss and disjunction of culture, language, gender, memory, time, and identity. In intermittent French, English and Latin and the letters of the Korean alphabet, Cha conflates her mother’s past with the stories of martyrs: Demeter and her daughter, Persephone, bride of the underworld, from Greek legend; the revolutionary heroine Yu Guan Soon from Korean history; and from Cha’s Catholic upbringing, Joan of Arc (Wallack). When reading Dictée one does not always know who or what she is writing about; the spare words leave the audience uncertain. The way Cha intermixes narrative reveals that her Korean national and cultural identity shares a connected, intergenerational grief and is constantly evolving in complexity.
“It murmurs inside. It murmurs. Inside is the pain of speech the pain to say. Larger still. Greater than is the pain to say. To not say. Says nothing against the pain to speak. It festers inside. The wound, liquid, dust. Must break. Must void... She allows others. In place of her. Admits others to make full. Make swarm. All barren cavities to make swollen. The others each occupying her. Tumorous layers, expel all excesses until in all cavities she is flesh.” (Excerpt from Dictee, pg. 3-4)
As evident in Cha’s work, Korean and Korean-American history and identity is gathered around this transcendent, intergenerational grief as Jennifer Cho states in her extensive essay “Mel-Han-Cholia as Political Practice in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée.” Drawing from theories of melancholy from David Eng, David Kazanjian, and Anne Anlin Cheng, Cho uses Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée to reevaluate the accepted linear trajectory of Asian American identity formation in the U.S. Through the term mel-han-choly—a hybridized form of melancholy and Korean han (a culturally specific grief)—, Cho claims that Cha’s remembrance of the histories of Japanese colonialism in the Korean peninsula and the Korean War is in fact a subversive political tool to defer historical closure. Cha’s addressal of Korean history from a non-American, dynamic, personal as well as collective perspective “challenges dominant understandings of the U.S. as a liberator of South Korea and the U.S.’s discursive power in narrating its history” (Cho). At the same time, though mel-han-choly focuses on the fractured relationships, this shared sense of loss in fact serves as a connective, transnational function within the diasporic Korean community, ultimately defying the expectation that minority populations should move past their grievous pasts in becoming model American citizens (Cho). Though at first glance, the themes of alienation and fragmentation can seem purposeless, over time we see that this suffering is what binds the different narratives, peoples, languages, and cultures together.
Alongside Dictée, Cha did different experimental works which also show her rich investigation with linguistics and multi-media. They are now mostly preserved in The University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. By using performance, speech, and text, forms drawn from French psychoanalytic cinema and linguistic theory of the 1970s, Korean cultural traditions, concrete poetry, and conceptual art, Cha explores interactions of language, meaning, and memory. Interlacing a rigorous analytical approach with a spiritual evocation of suffering and transformation she navigates through themes of exile, alienation, redemption (BAMPFA).
As Wallack says, “Cha made quiet work with a disquieting impact.” Those who saw her performances remember that she spoke softly, with the hypnotic rhythms of incantation. Having studied Korean dance and tai chi, her movements were fluid and slow along with her spoken and unspoken words. Cha would often perform in front of a screen on which slides were projected, weaving through the patterned light. Through overlapping different mediums and even breaking the boundaries between them through experimentation, Cha longed to make her artwork extend into a space beyond the physical into the emotional, mental, spiritual realms. We can see that in her performance piece in 1975 documented by 28 photographs and typewritten texts A Ble Wail (A Blue Whale). Cha writes about the performance, “I want to be the dream of the audience.” She seemed to have done just that with herself robed in white, unfurling banners of black and red cloth in a candlelit space and with the audience watching through a curtain. These dreamlike sequences were accompanied by sounds that “came from singing glasses, sheets being torn, and percussive instruments.” as it says in her notes (Wallack).
Mouth to Mouth
(Photo Courtesy of The University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive)
In her 8 minute-long video Mouth to Mouth made in 1975, Cha invites the audience into the agony and isolation of the inability to voice, listen, and understand through her own physical making of sounds. Cha isolates and repeats a simple, physical act—a mouth forming the eight Korean vowel graphemes over a soundtrack of bubbling water and bird song—so that this ordinary action becomes something primal and riveting (EAI). “Seeing the mouth through a haze of white static, what might have been clear at the point of transmission arrives as a snowy apparition” (Wallack). Her other performance and visual pieces include Re Dis Appearing, Father/Mother, Secret Spill, Untitled, Vidéoème, and Surplus Novel.
Re Dis Appearing
Untitled
(Photo Courtesy of The University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive)
With all her artwork, whether through verbal, visual, musical elements, Cha seeks to “embody the in-between” according to Hyo K. Kim. Intertwining distinct ways of speech, action, or underlying thought, Cha illuminates language, culture, and identity as embodied, intersubjective processes. She is not afraid to “break the rigid restrictions of linguistics and society” (Kim) that have kept her contained for so long. Thus, in the Asian American and American literary history and political conversation, Cha cannot be confined in one category, for she lingers in all the different issues and unknowns of the individual and the communal, the past and present, narrative and history (Kim).
Her tragic death where she was raped and murdered a week after Dictée was published in 1982 left her voiceless, mysterious, and in tragedy once again. Yet, her death also speaks volumes about the ephemerality of life and the transcendence of time and emotional, intellectual space that pervades her work. Cha ultimately created a space where grief, alienation, and voicelessness could be addressed and embodied in its various complexities.
Featured photo courtesy of Berkeley: Third Woman Press and The University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
Works Cited
Cha, Theresa Hak Kyung. 1995. Dictée. Berkeley: Third Woman Press.
Lewallen, Constance. “The Dream of the Audience: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (1951-1982).” Women’s Art Inc. JSTOR. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1358816. Accessed 2 Oct. 2020.
Wallack, Amei. “ART/ARCHITECTURE; Theresa Cha: In Death, Lost And Found.” The New York Times. 20 April 2003. https://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/20/arts/art-architecture–theresa-cha-in-death-lost-and-found.html. Accessed 3 Oct. 2020.
EAI. “Theresa Hak Kyung Cha” Electronic Arts Intermix https://www.eai.org/artists/theresa-hak-kyung-cha/biography Accessed 29 Sep. 2020.
BAMPFA. “BAMPFA Mounts Major Solo Exhibition of Work by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha” The University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. 19 Jan. 2018 https://bamlive.s3.amazonaws.com/TheresaCha_PressRelease_FINAL_1.18.pdf. Accessed 30 Sep. 2019.
Kim, Sue J. “Narrator, Author, Reader: Equivocation in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s “Dictee.”” Narrative, Vol. 16, No. 2 (May, 2008), pp. 163-177. Ohio State University Press. https://www.jstor.org/stable/30219281. Accessed 29 Sep. 2020.
Cho, Jennifer. “Mel-Han-Cholia as Political Practice in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée.” Meridians, vol. 11, no.1, 2011, pp. 36-61. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/meridians. Accessed 29 Sep. 2020.
Kim, Hyo K. “Embodying the In-Between: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s ‘Dictee.’” Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal, vol. 46, no. 4, 2013, pp. 127–143. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/44030712. Accessed 29 Sep. 2020.
Beyond the Single Story 