Theresa Hak Kyung Cha

Dictee

This restored edition reflects Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s original vision and intentions for Dictee, a foundational and unparalleled text of modern Asian American literature. Dictee is the best-known work of the multidisciplinary Korean American artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. This restored edition, produced in partnership with the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA), reflects Cha’s original vision for the book. Featuring the original cover and high-quality reproductions of the interior layout as Cha intended them, this version of Dictee faithfully renders the book as an art object in its authentic form. A formative text of modern Asian American literature, Dictee is a dynamic autobiography that tells the story of several women: the Korean revolutionary Yu Guan Soon, Joan of Arc, Demeter and Persephone, Cha’s mother Hyung Soon Huo (a Korean born in Manchuria to first-generation Korean exiles), and Cha herself. Cha’s work manifests in nine parts structured around the Greek Muses. Deploying a variety of texts, documents, images, and forms of address and inquiry, Cha links these women’s stories to explore the trauma of dislocation and the fragmentation of memory it causes. The result is an enduringly powerful, beautiful, unparalleled work.

Constance Lewallen

Lawrence Rinder

Thi Minh-Ha Trinh

Berkeley Art Museum

Performance art, video, ceramics, mail and stamp art, artist's books, and works on paper are part of the range of pioneering and influential work by Korean American artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha that are showcased with scholarly essays in this exhibition catalog.

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (1951-1982)

The Dream of the Audience

Temps morts : selected works

Exilée

"Mastery over language that was borrowed, that was not her mother tongue, enabled Theresa Hak Kyung Cha to empathize with her viewer (her distant audience) as powerfully as any artist I know. In Exilée and Temps Morts I listen with fascination as her tongue exercises furtively and nimbly, convincing me that Cha would have been the exemplary artist of identity had she lived another ten years."--Byron Kim "Conceptual, poetic, visual, the writings of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha are radical and subtle responses to the artistic context of their time and reveal powerful areas of exploration to readers. Like few other contemporary collections, this book opens up new horizons in literature, art history, film theory, and linguistics, emphasizing the originality of a unique body of work that belongs both to history and to the present."--Elvan Zabunyan, author of Black Is a Color "Since its publication within weeks of her premature death, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictée has attracted academic, feminist, literary, and cult followings. But despite the passion that erupts through its surface, it is in many ways an austere book. It withholds something--and purposefully so. This unexpected new collection of Cha's other, previously uncollected writings/inscribings offers something gentler, more intimate--and, though not less alienated, perhaps, the Cha we encounter in Exilée and Temps Morts is more playful. The works collected here resonate with vivacity and the luminous presence that was, and remains, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. "--Lyn Hejinian, author of A Border Comedy

Temps Morts : Selected Works

In her radical exploration of cultural and personal identity, the writer and artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha sought “the roots of language before it is born on the tip of the tongue.” Her first book, the highly original postmodern text Dictee, is now an internationally studied work of autobiography. This volume, spanning the period between 1976 and 1982, brings together Cha’s previously uncollected writings and text-based pieces with images. Exilee and Temps Morts are two related poem sequences that explore themes of language, memory, displacement, and alienation—issues that continue to resonate with artists today. Back in print with a new cover, this stunning selection of Cha’s works gives readers a fuller view of a major figure in late twentieth-century art. Copublished by Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha

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