Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's best-known work is currently out of print. Cha was murdered in 1982, and while foundations and archives preserve her work, and critics continue to trace out her multiple influences, this writer and multimedia Performance artist can only...
[more]Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's best-known work is currently out of print. Cha was murdered in 1982, and while foundations and archives preserve her work, and critics continue to trace out her multiple influences, this writer and multimedia Performance artist can only be explored by the average person through a trip to the used-book section of the local bookstore.
If lucky, he or she will find a copy of "Dictee," Cha's phenomenal literary work. Originally published in 1982, "Dictee" densely interweaves artistic genres in such a way as to resemble the complexity of a self. The book's focus is a Korean sensibility of colonialism and displacement, seen variously through second-language exercises, journalistic and personal accounts, a daughter's recovering of her mother's history, and the visual text provided by photographs, charts, Asian ideographs, and film stills. The work effectively brings broken pieces together in a way that includes their partialities.
The language of "Dictee" is a hybrid of the authoritative languages of grammar, mythology, history, colonialism, and film. Cha incorporates the language and rhythms of textbook exercises, prayers, dreams, and historical documents, while she opens them to critique and to reappropriation, using repetition and broken grammar to force new meaning through old forms. It is remarked of "Dictee," and of Cha's work as a whole, that it compels the audience to become aware of both the creation and the refusal of the authorial position.
Cha was born in Pusan, Korea, in 1951, emigrated with her family to Hawaii in 1962, and from there to San Francisco in 1964. By the age of 13, then, she was a veteran of dislocation. Her Catholic-school upbringing in the States overlaid her Korean roots with Christianity and steeped her in the French language and Greco-Roman classics; as an undergraduate at UC Berkeley, Cha studied French film, Korean poetry, and the work of experimental writers like Joyce, Duras, and Wittig. While an undergraduate she also began her installation/performance work, presenting the piece "Secret Spill" in 1974.
Cha eventually earned two graduate degrees while continuing to create art work across various media. She moved to New York in 1980, where she worked as a writer and video/filmmaker. In 1981 she received an NEA grant and a post-doctoral fellowship to travel to Korea to shoot footage for a project called "White Dust from Mongolia." On returning, she worked as an instructor and took a job at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, all the while getting her own work seen and published.
In 1982, just as "Dictee" came out, Cha was murdered on her way to meet her husband. The circumstances of her death are something of a mystery; her murderer has never been identified, and no one in the know seems to be talking about the incident. The shock and dismay that always accompanies an unexpected death -- not to mention a violent one -- is compounded here by the loss of a gifted young woman who made art out of the most pressing issues of her time. Certainly with "Dictee" Cha introduced a new way to use language to speak the potently hybrid worlds our lives have become.
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