Cha, Theresa Hak Kyung, 1951-1982

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (Korean: 차학경; March 4, 1951 – November 5, 1982) was an American novelist, producer, director, and artist of South Korean origin, best known for her 1982 novel, Dictée. Considered an avant-garde artist, Cha was fluent in Korean, English, and French. The main body of Cha's work is "looking for the roots of language before it is born on the tip of the tongue."[1] Cha's practice experiments with language through repetition, manipulation, reduction, and isolation, exploring the ways in which language marks one's identity, in unstable and multiple expressions.[2] Cha's interdisciplinary background was clearly evident in Dictée, which experiments with juxtaposition and hypertext of both print and visual media. Cha's Dictée is frequently taught in contemporary literature classes including women's literature.

Early life
Cha was born in Busan, South Korea during the Korean War. She was the middle child of five, with two older and two younger siblings,[3] to Hyung Sang Cha (father) and Hyung Soon Cha (mother), who were both raised in Manchuria during Japan’s occupation of Korea and China, and forced to learn and work in Japanese.[4]

Cha and her family emigrated to the United States in 1962 when Cha was twelve years old, first settling in Hawaii and then relocating in 1964 to the San Francisco Bay Area,[5] where she attended Convent of the Sacred Heart High School. During her time there, Cha studied French language,[6] and French, Greek, and Roman classics. She also sang in the choir at Sacred Heart. By the time she graduated Cha had earned many scholastic awards, including a poetry contest prize at the age of fourteen, two years after she started learning English.[7][8]

Education
Before committing to University of California Berkeley, Cha briefly attended the University of San Francisco for a semester. She transferred to UC Berkeley the following year, where she completed her studies in art and writing. As an art student, she initially concentrated on ceramic sculpture. However, she was soon introduced to the then new medium of performance, and subsequently embarked on a series of performances as protagonist, all accompanied by her live or recorded spoken words.[3] One of her classmates at Berkeley was artist Yong Soon Min.[9]

As a student, she became close friends with Dennis Love, another student, and Bertrand Augst, a professor of French and comparative literature. Her classes with Augst inspired Cha to study comparative literature, in which she later earned degrees.[7] Teachers and friends have stated that Cha enjoyed reading broadly, anything from Korean poetry to European modernist and postmodern literature. She received her Bachelor's degree in comparative literature in 1973 and a second Bachelor's degree in art in 1975, both from Berkeley.

During this time, the Free Speech Movement and anti-war movement of the 1970s resulted in an air of political and social upheaval for Berkeley students demanding socio-political change.[10] The unrest fed into the experimentation of conceptual art movements of the Bay Area. Performance art became particularly strong in the Bay Area during Cha's schooling in the 1970s, as one of many new genres being explored by artists seeking to escape the restraints of traditional art forms, with a revolutionary spirit related to the radical political and cultural shifts taking place. Though Cha was not an active participant in protest activities, she drew on the experimental qualities they represented, without her work itself being overtly socio-political.[11] Cha worked as a student employee of the Pacific Film Archive for three years between 1974 and 1977 while earning two graduate degrees in art (MA, 1977; MFA, 1978).[5]

Cha's MFA thesis Paths (1978) highlighted the critical role of the viewer as the receptor and activator of her work. In it, she notes: "The viewer holds the position as the complement, an avenue, through multiple interpretations, give [sic] multiple dimensions to the work. If the work has the strength (this is very subjective) the renewal and regenerating processes could be illimitable."[12] Thus for Cha, the "viewer" of the work is not merely a passive subject; they are the "complement" or "avenue" that keeps the work alive with perpetual regeneration.[13]

As a graduate student, she became close friends with faculty member Jim Melchert,[14] and even became his teaching assistant in 1976. As Cha's interest in film grew, she studied at Berkeley under Bertrand Augst, who recalls her interest in poetry written by Stéphane Mallarmé and plays by Samuel Beckett. According to Augst, Cha felt an affinity with Mallarmé's associative and restrained use of language.[7] Beckett's highly reductive style of theater found echoes in the spare setting of Cha's performances. More than the stylistic influence of Beckett or Mallarmé, Cha's studies of film theory with Augst had perhaps the greatest effect on her development. From these studies, Cha hoped to integrate film theory into her art practice. In an application for an extension of her grant to study in Paris, Cha wrote: "It is essential for me to see the possibilities of Film-making as an expression closely tied with other expressions supported by its theory as Reference to see the application of theory to actual works followed by a re-recognition, 'realization' of the theory in practice."[15]

In 1976, Cha decided to pursue a degree in film theory at the UC Education Abroad Program, Centre d'Etudes Americain du Cinema, in Paris. During her stay she studied under Jean-Louis Baudry, Raymond Bellour, Monique Wittig, and Christian Metz.[7] Her encounter with their theories culminated in her editing an anthology of writings entitled Apparatus/Cinematographic Apparatus: Selected Writings (Tanam Press, 1980), which includes articles by Roland Barthes, Jean-Louis Baudry, Theirry Kuntzel, Christian Metz, Bertrand Augst, and others as well as a piece by Cha herself, a major work based on word deconstruction titled Commentaire.[16] In the filmic, multipage text, Cha deconstructs the French word commentaire into French and English components and homonyms (comment, taire, commentary, tear, etc.).[17] In her preface for the book, Cha states: "The intention is to identify the individual components and complete film apparatus, the interdependent operations comprising the film, the author of the film, the spectator... The essential element of the project is to reveal the process of film and make accessible the theoretical writings and materials of filmmakers."[18]

While studying in Paris, Cha spent a short time in Amsterdam and met a group of artists, most of whom were from Iceland. One of whom was Ulises Carrion, a poet, author of artists' books, video and filmmaker who founded Other Books and So in Amsterdam, where Cha exhibited her artist book, presence/absence (1975) in 1977.[19]

Career and personal life

Mario Ciampi designed the building (completed in 1970) that was the former home of the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) on Bancroft Way in Berkeley, California, where Cha worked while attending graduate school. Cha's estate donated her works to BAMPFA in 1991.
Cha began her career as a performance artist, producer, director, and writer in 1974. She also worked as an usher and cashier from 1974 to 1977 at the Pacific Film Archive, with friends. She was known to study and practice mainly in the Bay Area as well as Paris and New York.[13]

In 1979, Cha traveled back to South Korea for the first time in seventeen years. She had long expressed great anticipation to return in her book Exilée, where she describes the flight in terms of the sixteen time zones that separate San Francisco from Seoul. As a major event in her life and work, her family's exile from Korea in 1963 was a subject she treated often symbolically, representing displacement through shifts and ruptures in the visual and linguistic forms of her work. In a broad group of works, Cha engages a variety of theoretical models to articulate the experience of displacement.[20] That year in 1979, Cha also performed her work Other Things Seen, Other Things Heard at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, attracting the attention of Robert Atkins, art critic for the San Francisco Bay Guardian.[21]

In August 1980, Cha moved to New York City, working as an editor and writer for Tanam Press. Earlier that year, she also traveled to Japan and then back to South Korea, this time working on the film White Dust From Mongolia from May to July 1980 with her brother.[5] They were never able to finish the film due to the dangerous political situation in South Korea at the time. South Korea's President Park Chung Hee had just been assassinated the previous year and restrictive new laws had been declared. The Chas were harassed by South Korean officials who thought they might be North Korean spies.[7]

In 1981, Cha began teaching video art at Elizabeth Seton College while working in the design department of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She was awarded an artist's residence at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in 1982.[5] She married photographer Richard Barnes in May 1982; the two had met in a drawing class in 1975, during her time at UC Berkeley.[5][21][7]A week after her novel Dictée was published, on November 5, 1982, Cha was raped and murdered by Joey Sanza, a security guard at the Puck Building on Lafayette Street in Lower Manhattan.[63] She had gone there to meet her husband Richard Barnes, who was documenting the renovation of the building and had an office there. Sanza raped, strangled, and then bludgeoned her to death, removing a ring from her finger.[44]

Sanza, who had since been imprisoned in Florida for 12 counts of sexual battery committed between January and June 1982, was indicted for the rape and murder of Cha in 1983,[64] and, after three separate trials, eventually convicted on those charges in 1987.[44]

Shortly before her death, Cha had been working on an artistic piece for a group show at Artists Space in SoHo.[65] The Artists Space exhibit ultimately became a memorial for her, showcasing images and text from Dictée.[29] Additional work left incomplete at the time of her death included another film, a book, a critique of advertising, and a piece on the representation of hands in Western painting.[7]

The New York Times published an obituary of Cha as part of its Overlooked series in 2022.[66]

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha was born on March 4, 1951 in Pusan, South Korea. Her family had fled to this southern port city to escape the advancing North Korean and Chinese armies during the height of the Korean War. The Chas remained in Korea until 1962 when they emigrated to America, settling first in Hawaii and then moving to San Francisco in 1964. The Bay Area remained Cha's home for most of her life.
She attended the Convent of the Sacred Heart, a Catholic school, where she began her studies in the French language. After graduating from high school, Cha enrolled briefly at the University of San Francisco and then transfered to the University of California at Berkeley where she continued her studies for ten years, receiving four degrees: B.A Comparative Literature (1973), B.A. Art (1975), M.A. Art (1977), and M.F.A. Art (1978). Of particular importance to her studies were Professor Bertrand Augst of the French and Comparative Literature Departments with whom she investigated film and French film theory and James Melchert, Professor in the Practice of Art Department with whom she studied performance and conceptual art.
From 1974 to 1977 Cha worked as an usher and cashier at the Pacific Film Archive of the University Art Museum in Berkeley. She had the opportunity to view numerous classic and experimental films and to hear lectures by filmmakers such as Jean-Luc Goddard, Chris Marker, etc. In l976 Cha lived in Europe, studying at the Centre d'Etudes Americaine du Cinema in Paris, staying briefly in Amsterdam, and traveling in France, Belgium, Holland, and Germany. During her brief stay in Europe she came into contact with many curators, artists, and writers including: Christian Metz, Raymond Bellour, Thierry Kuntzel, Monique Wittig, Hreinn Frithfinsson, and Ulisses Carrion.
In 1979 Cha made her first return trip to Korea. She returned again in 1981 to begin shooting the unfinished film, White Dust From Mongolia.
In August of 1980 Cha moved to New York City. She worked as an editor and writer for Tanam Press, producing two important works: Dictee, a book-form collage of poetry, found text, and images; and Apparatus, an anthology of writings on the film apparatus. In 1981 she was appointed Instructor in Video Art at Elizabeth Seton College and also worked in the design department of the Metropolitan Museum. In 1982 Cha was awarded an artist's residence at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. She married Richard Barnes, a close friend since 1975, in May 1982.
On November 5, 1982, Cha was murdered in New York City.
Lawrence Rinder Curator for Twentieth Century Art Berkeley Art Museum, University of California
Scope and Content

THE ART OF THERESA CHA: OVERVIEW
Although she lived only 31 years, Theresa Cha left a substantial and diverse body of work. The primary mediums in which she worked were: ceramic, performance, artist's books, concrete poetry, film, video, sculpture, mail art, audio, and slide projections. In many cases her work combined aspects of different media, blurring the boundaries between conventionally distinct categories. It was characteristic of Cha to take the thematic and formal approaches developed in one medium and reinterpret them in another; elements of film and video, for example, find their way into artist's books and vice versa.
The central theme of Cha's art is displacement. While she occasionally addressed the personal and historical circumstances of her exile directly, Cha typically treated this theme symbolically, representing displacement through shifts and ruptures in the visual and linguistic forms of her works. She developed an approach to displacement based largely on cinematic forms and the psychoanalytic aspects of French film theory. Cha integrated elements of these theories into her own exploration of the processes of memory, communication, and psychic transformation.
Cha's art incorporated a wide array of references drawn from diverse cultures and periods. From her native Korean culture, she incorporated elements of traditional dance, shamanism, and childhood traditions of making handmade books. Korean avant-garde poetry, itself partially inspired by French Symbolism, was also influential. Both Confucianism and Catholicism--the two predominant spiritual traditions in Korea--are central to Cha's work, especially the theme of redemption through suffering and the idea of family as spiritual community. In her approach to language, Cha combined the aesthetic ideals of concrete poetry and certain forms of conceptual art with a rigorous, analytical method derived, in part, from her readings of Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, and Jacques Lacan. The psychologist A.R. Luria's theories of memory were especially influential in Cha's later work.