Theresa Hak Kyung Cha - Squarecylinder.com – Art Reviews | Art Museums

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, “White Dust from Mongolia,” 198O. Courtesy of the Theresa Hak Kyung Cha Memorial Foundation.

Continuing through April 19, 2026

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s retrospective, “Multiple Offerings” pays tribute to the versatility of Cha’s work, touching upon her critical explorations of language, memory, and diasporic identity. Her interdisciplinary avant-garde practice explores themes of displacement, memory, and language, bridging French film theory, linguistics, and her personal experience with Korean history, exile and immigration. The entire spectrum of her oeuvre is represented, from 1973 until Cha’s untimely death in 1982, when she was raped and murdered in New York City.

While providing a comprehensive view of Cha’s art and archives, the curators place her within a network including ten other artists who are represented in the exhibition. This unusual touch to a one-person survey highlights the collaborative artistic environments in which she worked. The network includes Cha’s teacher and mentor Jim Melchert, who influenced her to move from ceramic sculpture to a more process-oriented practice.

Na Mira, “Marquee,” 2023, 16 mm film transfer to HD, transmitter, radios, mirrors, wood, paint, dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist.

Great emphasis is placed on Cha’s influence on younger artists. There is, for example, an installation by Na Mira that was inspired by Cha’s unfinished film “White Dust from Mongolia” (1980). The 16mm film exists only as a fragment: raw footage of city scenes filmed in Seoul and Busan in 1980, along with archival material of the storyboard and the script. The intended plot revolves around a woman who loses her memory and her ability to speak. “White Dust,” a collaboration with Cha’s brother, reflects the experiences of their grandmother and mother, who had fled Japanese colonial rule to live in Manchuria.

Cha’s film fragment is positioned in dialogue with Mira’s moving-image installation “Marquee” (2023). While viewing Cha’s silent black-and-white images, the sound of Radio Korea from Los Angeles accompanies Mira’s cinematic installation and blends with Cha’s footage. In the installation, a woman climbs through empty rows of movie theater seats until she reaches the blank screen — a scene that Cha envisioned as the ending of her own film. In another projection, the same woman repeatedly slams a film clapperboard while English and Korean words appear on mirrors positioned across the floor and along the wall. Curator Victoria Sung’s catalog text speaks of Mira’s approach as one that moves off the screen and into the space of the viewer in a seemingly infinite process of reduplication, refraction, and reversal, activating an expansive understanding of the work of art not as a closed object but as an open field of signification.

In a similar vein, the exhibition follows a multifaceted path, building a rich and nuanced perspective on an artist whose works ultimately elude any single narrative. It is a method that Cha herself described as “Multiple Telling with Multiple Offering.” Curators Sung and Tausif Noor have opted for a roughly chronological approach structured around the geographical locations that shaped Cha’s art and life. The curators recapitulate the fluidity of her practice by not isolating artworks, creating synergies through an assemblage-like style of presentation.

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, “Exilée,” 1980, super 8 film and video installation; black and white, sound, 50 min. Installation view of Exilée at San Francisco Art Institute. Courtesy of the Theresa Hak Kyung Cha Memorial Foundation.

Only “Exilée” (1980) is located in a separate room, which allows for an immersive experience. Great care was taken to reconstruct the installation according to the artist’s original instructions. The work draws on the theme of exile and on Cha’s probing into the limitless possibilities of association, aspects consistently inscribed into her oeuvre. In “Exilée,” video images appear on a small monitor embedded in the center of a freestanding wall, while two 8mm films with time-lapse black-and-white photography are projected onto the entire surface of the wall. Thus, displacement manifests not only through the associative content generated by Cha’s selection of words and images, but also in the presentation of the screens.

The wall-sized projection alternates between two sparse interior spaces. The action takes place on the embedded small monitor and in the voice-over. Words as typewritten text appear and disappear like lines from a poem, but most of the time are not in sync with Cha’s spoken-word narration, adding another layer that hints at spatial and linguistic uprooting. “Exilée” was created after her first trip back to South Korea in 1979. (She was born in Busan in 1951 and emigrated with her parents and siblings to San Francisco in 1964.) The work imparts a feeling of loss and longing, with Cha’s calm voice creating a meditative effect.

In other parts of the exhibition, sensory overload proves disruptive. “Rain Dreamed by Sound: Homage to Theresa Hak Kyung Cha” (2020) is a sound art piece by Cecilia Vicuña and Ricardo Gallo that floats through the exhibition space like a veil that imposes itself onto the subconscious. Vicuña adds her own poetic mourning, incorporating phrases from Cha’s mail art piece “Audience Distant Relative” (1977–78) in which the audience is addressed as “distant relative.” Vicuña’s piece brims with hindsight regret at not being able to prevent Cha’s murder. The elegy also includes passages from “Dictée” (1982), the genre-bending publication for which Cha is best known, published just a week prior to her death. Vicuña’s mourning draws attention to the persistent nightmare of gender-based violence and breathes new life into the souls of those affected.

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, “A Ble Wail,” 1975, black and white photograph of performance, 11 1/2 x 8 1/4”. Courtesy of the Theresa Hak Kyung Cha Memorial Foundation.

In “A Ble Wail” (1975) a gauze curtain separated the artist from the audience to create a sacred environment that played with opacity and shadow. The performance drew heavily on Korean shamanistic rituals. Cha pulled out long strips of red and black fabric that were hidden in the sleeves of her long white robe. Similarly, “Aveugle Voix” (1975) shows Cha dressed entirely in white, covering her eyes with a cloth marked voix (voice), and her mouth with one reading aveugle (blind). She proceeds to unroll a fabric banner, revealing a set of phrases in both English and French addressing the limits of speech and the politics of who is allowed to speak. Cha is speechless in this performance, referring to the language barrier she experienced as a young immigrant, but also to family members who were banned from speaking Korean under Japanese occupation. All-white attire signified political resistance to that occupation.

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, “Aveugle Voix,” 1975, documentation of performance rehearsal at Greek Theater, University of California, Berkeley. Photograph by Trip Callaghan. Courtesy of the Theresa Hak Kyung Cha Memorial Foundation.

Cha’s voice can be heard while viewing “Aveugle Voix.” The voice emanates from “Exilée,” wafting across the open space above the partition walls. Her voice, in this context, is that of a ghost, emitting what sounds like an echo without being clearly understandable. Her intimate register thus, unexpectedly, animates the entire exhibition. The blend of piece on piece, sound on sound, may appear accidental, but nothing is in this carefully designed exhibition. As Cha wrote on one of the cards in her mail art piece, “the messenger is the voice-presence occupying the space.”