Over the course of the 1970s and early 1980s, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha created a small body of art and writing celebrated in Asian American culture for its embrace of difficulty. Her best-known project, the experimental text Dictee (1982), contains an unpredictable mix of forms—catechism, letter, biography, schoolbook—and images ranging from anatomy charts and Paleolithic cave art to brush calligraphy by Cha’s father. Its title alludes to French dictation exercises, and near the start it uses those exercises as a poetic structure:

Open paragraph    It was the first day period    She had come from a far    period    tonight at dinner    comma    the families would ask    comma    open quotation marks    How was the first day  interrogation mark    close quotation marks    at least to say the least of it possible    comma    the answer would be    open    quotation marks    there is but one thing    period    There is someone    period    From a far    period close quotation marks

Her video installations and performances are just as demanding, often erasing context in a bid to force the viewer into perceiving the familiar with new eyes. One untitled Super 8 work runs the camera over everyday objects, such as an umbrella’s spokes, in unrecognizably close detail. In another, phrases such as “far, “farther,” and “far again” flash across a white screen at irregular intervals. One of her more elaborate mature projects, Exilée (1980), sets a small cathode-ray television within a larger, wall-sized projection; the two channels play contrasting, apparently unrelated scenes while a recording of Cha’s breathy, flutelike voice reads peculiar selections from what sounds like corporate mail, a Japanese menu, and a poem about time zones.

Recurring fixations emerge across her work: language’s quirks and failures, the play of black and white, scenes from early childhood, an intense love of family, French culture, Korean history. Cha came of age as an artist in the heyday of structuralist and psychoanalytic theory, which honed her efforts to break open symbols and probe preconscious states. Rejecting conventional sense-making posed a particular challenge in an era when American audiences often expected Asian artists and writers to offer straightforward, ethnography-like representations of their “home cultures.”

Her output has inspired a tradition of experiment, especially among women artists of Korea’s diaspora. More than a generation of poets—among them Myung Mi Kim, Cathy Park Hong, Don Mee Choi, and Monica Youn—have named her as an influence, as have visual and performance artists including Mandy El-Sayegh, Renée Green, Na Mira, and Latipa. In The New York Times’s “Overlooked No More” series, the novelist Min Jin Lee recalls reading Cha for the first time and admiring her “sense of entitlement to have that level of difficulty.” In the literary critic Rachel Carroll’s eyes, “Cha has accrued an increasingly large and rhapsodic following, exactly because of her difficulty, in form and content, and not despite it.”¹

But Cha’s archives attest to a surprising second voice: clearer, angrier, self-possessed. Among her papers is a letter written in capitals on the back of a program to the photographer Richard Barnes, then her fiancé, in which she fumes over how the Women’s Caucus for Art invited her to participate in an SFMOMA group show, but then left her no time to rehearse Exilée properly: “The room is totally light, the wall is not built, nothing is ready. I am ready. Wasting my time,” she wrote. “They act as though they are doing us a favor, rather, we are merely janitors. We are being used to promote themselves, and they are using their female sex, titling themselves feminists…and using other women for their own status quo.” She leaves implied that her heritage in what was then the developing world looked good on the group’s promotional materials.

Cha was then about to turn thirty. When she was eleven, her family left Korea following Park Chung Hee’s military coup. She moved to the Bay Area by fourteen, and spent much of her adult life there. Her invitation to the SFMOMA performance came when she was three years out of an MFA at UC Berkeley and living in New York, where she worked as an assistant at the Met and a video art instructor at a Yonkers college. Her art was on the brink of wider recognition, especially in San Francisco. She had shown in Paris, Amsterdam, Melbourne, and Reykjavik, and hungered for more—including larger audiences, even when she didn’t want to make it easy for them. She held high standards for finish and polish, including in work that can feel improvisatory. Her letter continues, “If it’s not ready, I will not show, and I will use my microphone to announce why, I will practice my speech in examining this entire oppressive situation.” Her obliquity grew from a perfectly clear sense of purpose. For whom was she cultivating it?

Cha’s career ended less than two years after she wrote that frustrated note. A serial rapist assaulted and murdered her in New York in November 1982. Every writer on Cha feels obligated to strike a difficult balance between two imperatives: not to let her violent death eclipse her work, but also not to euphemize racialized sexual violence. Her reputation never waned; her friends, family, and colleagues faithfully tended her legacy. But pursuing a murder conviction required three exhausting, preoccupying trials, which dragged on till the end of 1987. By the early 1990s, when an Association of Asian American Studies panel on Dictee led to the first book-length study on Cha, Writing Self, Writing Nation, its five contributors tended to speak as if they were recovering an overlooked figure—a woman artist of color whose work deserved and repaid the kind of line-by-line attention long trained on writers such as Joyce or Nabokov.

“Multiple Offerings,” the largest retrospective of Cha’s work to date, debuted at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive before starting its current run at New York’s Artists Space. The exhibit’s excellent catalog, edited by Victoria Sung, incorporates a wealth of material not on view and triples the amount of art reproduced in the only previous publication of Cha’s work, an out-of-print black-and-white volume. Dictee has long drawn more attention than Cha’s videos, installations, performances, and films; “Multiple Offerings” makes her scope more fully legible and accessible.

Sung’s ampler curation reveals the consistency of Cha’s voice and themes over time. Her earliest datable student work, a 1973 handmade book titled 坤 Earth (Dedicated to Parents), appears full-fledged:

CALLOUS WEST BITTER HEARTS
LAUGH
CELEBRATE PAIN
SUN CONTEMPTUOUS

SOMEWHERE NAMELESS
IN THICK WALLS
CHANTING AROUND AND AROUND
STRANGE FOREIGN TONGUE

RETREATED.
ROWING DIGGING
RESISTING SPACE NEVER FULL OR LOST
STARING ONE ASKS,
WAS IT A NICE DREAM?

CHANGING FACE
MIRRORS YELLOW

She was still working with many of the same images a decade later: walls, ritual, language, dreams, foreignness. Her sense of exile in an America she found strange and hostile (“callous West, bitter hearts”) recalls childhood memories she often revisited, especially from around 1962, when, as an eleven-year-old living temporarily in Hawai’i, she found herself surrounded by “strange foreign” English. (That experience may be the topic of the “Open paragraph” near Dictee’s beginning.) She later wrote that she wanted to trigger the same experience of prelinguistic thought in her audience, the sense of knowing “the roots of the language before it is born on the tip of the tongue.”

Her Catholic high school in San Francisco taught her French, and that third language constantly ran through her adult mind, weaving polyglot puns. Her intuition that thought exists prior to articulation in a particular language led her to try to impart that feeling to others, to simulate prelinguistic experience not just for monoglots but even across the different experiences of multilingualism within her family. The subtitle is a dedication, but also an address. The work betrays no concern that her parents might find it disorienting, and her mother in particular seems to have treasured everything her daughter made. She published a Korean-language book of her own after her daughter’s death, The Little Black Dot I Left Behind.

Some of Cha’s difficulty seems born of intimacy. Viewing or reading it feels like overhearing a family story or flipping through a photo album, sometimes literally: her 1977 Chronology consists of family pictures subjected to degradation through heavy photocopying, surrounded by mysterious, punning phrases set in mismatched type sizes. “could  have  b ee n  knot  one / pa / cing  second” hovers below a photo of her mother’s face superimposed over her father’s.

The surfaces in Cha’s art are often sleek, the tactics estranging; the work forces you into a pose of decipherment. But when you see it gathered in one place, it welcomes you into a family-like world. The postcards address you, the videos of even the strangest performances evoke some shared memory, the photographs of sites in Cha’s high school, college, or homes touch you even when the overall work offers little other traction. Cha took great interest in ritual, which appears throughout her work, and recent interpreters have read much of her art as enacting a kind of rite. The exhibit feels at times like a kind of home shrine, a memorial to a departed friend or family member. Some artists have literalized this: the first installment in the performer Dohye Lee’s ARA project (2014–2018) borrowed from Korean folk ritual in a work meant to “bring [Cha’s] spirit back to her home.”

At BAMPFA, “Multiple Offerings” traced a roughly chronological path through Cha’s work, starting from her undergraduate years and continuing through White Dust from Mongolia, an unfinished feature film project; Exilée, projected in a room-size space of its own; and source materials from Dictee at the very end, such as the images from postcards she used in altered form as the work’s ghostly illustrations. Her scale increases, as does the cost of her media. Super 8 gives way to 16mm; stenciled graphite, handmade bookwork, and mail art evolve into Dictee’s two hundred pages. She worked almost entirely in black and white, which makes one piece in color shocking: Display-ce, a carousel of Kodachrome slides depicting envelopes crumpled, stuffed, folded, or labeled, rich visually because of their red inner lining.

The most eye-catching material is her work in film and video, astonishing to those of us who have long had to imagine it from a handful of stills. She appears in many of her moving-image pieces, such as Untitled (Paper), where she waves, folds, and brushes pieces of paper across a table, slightly out of focus. In Translations from a Willow Tree (1976) she walks the camera past the windows of an upper-floor apartment over sans-serif words stenciled on the glass, floating in front of a stately building across the street. The surviving footage from White Dust from Mongolia plays on a loop, revealing the full, strange range of what Cha returned to Korea in 1979–1980 to shoot. Minutes pass watching fairground rides, people walking in and out of markets, slow horizontal pans over tile roofs, alleyways full of charcoal smoke. In contrast with Korean feature films from that period, her images feel like a time capsule stuffed with patient observations of ephemera.

Cha benefited from the support of friends, teachers, and institutions as she trained at making the kinds of art that earn a living slowly, if at all. She spent most of her adult life in degree programs at UC Berkeley: one BA in comparative literature, a second BA in art, then an MA in art, and finally an MFA, studying in Europe on Berkeley grants. Even after she graduated, she supported her work with a postdoctoral fellowship from the university. It was natural for Cha’s surviving family to place her archive with BAMPFA. In its Berkeley showing, “Multiple Offerings” incorporated a small selection of art by Cha’s teachers and friends, many from the Bay Area. Her instructor Jim Melchert, an artist across many media who taught for decades at Berkeley, had a quiet presence through his photographs of performance pieces. Melchert introduced her to the performance artist Terry Fox, also included.

The show also offered room to Cha’s peer circle. A large work on painted fabric by the artist and poet Cecilia Vicuña, who knew Cha in her final New York years through the feminist journal Heresies, towered over the central space in a memorial posture. Reese Williams, whose New York-based independent press, Tanam, published Cha’s print work, appeared briefly; so too did a video work by Yong Soon Min, a fellow Korean artist in America whose career until her death in 2024 offers a glimpse of the longer life Cha, too, might have had. (The three overlapped as students at Berkeley.) “Multiple Offerings” never strays far from Cha herself, but both the exhibit and the catalogue, in essays on Cha’s education by Tausif Noor and on Fox by the Artists Space exhibit organizer Danielle Jackson, do address the question of how to read her work as part of a shared milieu. They portray Cha as an artist who plied many trends of the time at least once—especially performance art and small, vernacular media—but never settled into just one form for long.

The greater share of the BAMPFA exhibition’s ancillary space went to younger artists working under Cha’s influence. Video pieces from the 1990s by Renée Green and L. Franklin Gilliam make clear that artists outside Asian American orbits took early interest in borrowing and imitating gestures and topics of Cha’s: filming oneself holding printed text to suggest the silencing of one’s voice, for instance. Contributions made within the past decade by young, ambitious, transnational Asian artists born in the 1980s illustrate Cha’s electrical attraction. Na Mira’s video installation Marquee recreates many of Cha’s stances on-screen with her own body, to the crackle of Los Angeles-area, Korean-language AM radio; Cici Wu’s Upon Leaving the White Dust projects traces of light from White Dust from Mongolia behind a series of small votive objects corresponding to the film’s storyboard. Jesse Chun works with Korean craft paper, finely slicing asemic language into the surface to produce vertical “concrete poems.” Each finds in Cha a way of pressing language beyond decipherable form—what she called the “tip of the tongue.”

Partly because of the consistency of Cha’s visual style and written voice over time, the work in “Multiple Offerings” often blurs process with product. The voice of her finished, exhibited work is improvisatory, fragmentary, pursuing spontaneous insights or puns. A 1976 work in ink on burlap consists of words including “HAND,” “HEARING,” “HALF MOON,” and “NEARING” intersecting like a crossword, while in Korean script the word dal (“moon”) hovers detached in a corner. Her unpublished notes similarly chase ideas through thickets of quasi-automatic writing until she seizes something:

i have time.
banishment  an insanity  birth to history  past present future
an offering  an erasing  the gum rubber scratching surface of document.
more pressure and more wearing to the tip until paper touches the metal.
an offering. to god the male white beard and flowing white hair robes
yards infinitum seated on a cloud attended by two maiden angels their hair jet black in ropes twisted arches then the rest flowing likewise with wind

This could have been an exercise in verbalizing her memories of Catholic high school, and it reads much the same as—indeed, with less irregular spelling than—passages of finished works such as Photo Essay, a combination of prints with typewritten text:

Yet, the rigid obssessive order
skirts of measured lenths
interdiction of crossed knees, pearl earrings,
patent leather shoes, dances on campus,
frosted hair
single file syncronized gestures:
kneeling, opening and closing desks,
steps down to lunch, cursy.

Elsewhere, however, Cha programs spontaneous-seeming gestures in detail. Untitled (Candle Performance), a twenty-six-minute video work from 1973, records her lighting and then blowing out small plain candles on three tables, as if in a ritual for an unknown religion. The order and timing feel completely arbitrary, but her notes reveal meticulous planning, down to the thirty-fourth shot.

The new exhibit and catalog offer ample selections from grant proposals and production materials that display Cha’s interpretations of her own work in a crisp, blunt idiom closer to her letter about the SFMOMA show than to her voice as artist. She had a clear idea of what she wanted to communicate—but her target was the unconscious and the nonverbal. Réveillé dans la Brume, for instance, a performance piece documented in vivid photos and a punctilious script, aimed to “speculate upon dimensions made visible to us through suggestion…attempting to find some collective key, associations, that would result in a kind of a transformation in the audience, as well as the performer.” Both parts of the title speak to her goal: awakening the viewer from illusion into something higher, yes, but also into a fog or mist rather than immediate clarity.

These documents help reconstruct Cha’s relationship to two aesthetic categories that loom large in her contemporary reception: the difficult and the opaque. In general use, “difficulty” and “opacity” are synonyms. But in the past several decades, they have taken on separate technical meanings in literary and cultural theory. Certain kinds of poetic difficulty, the critic George Steiner wrote in a 1978 essay, “confront us with blank questions about the nature of human speech, about the status of significance, about the necessity and purpose of the construct which we have,” together, “come to perceive as a poem.” He was thinking of how Mallarmé and Celan’s language might resemble Dada or surrealism on the surface—might even be provably indecipherable—and yet were neither mere “nonsense nor planned obfuscation.” More recent critics have used a version of difficulty downstream from Steiner’s as a way into works ranging from William Cowper’s eighteenth-century long poem The Task to the novels of Toni Morrison.

You might think “opacity” would mean something similar, but its meaning runs instead through conversations about race and ethnicity. The Martinican French cultural thinker Édouard Glissant argued in his 1990 book Poétique de la relation for “the right to opacity for everyone” as the opposite of an anthropologizing, missionary “transparency” eager to interpret and explain all cultural difference. In mutual opacity between cultures, one might “feel in solidarity with [the other] or build with him,” but “it is not necessary for me to grasp him.” Opacity has come to describe art designed to be selectively understood by different audiences, and perhaps not understood by certain audiences at all—a form of radical independence, especially from the West’s or a racial majority’s gaze.

Cha’s popularity lies squarely at the intersection of the difficult and the opaque. On the one hand, many viewers and readers identify with her efforts to express the ineffable, as an émigrée whose upbringing left her dislocated among the Korean she spoke as a child, the English she lived in afterward, and the French from her schooling. The German artist Uljana Wolf, mapping Cha’s multilingualism onto her own, writes, “Cha makes traceable what it means to be someone who has a language that is not ‘the right one,’ not their own, not original or real.”

On the other hand, reader after reader over the past quarter century has lionized Cha for using language and image to decline the kind of sense-making the median viewer can decipher, cultivating different degrees of intelligibility for different parts of her audience. Writing in the 2024 collection She Follows No Progression: A Theresa Hak Kyung Cha Reader (edited by Juwon Jun and Rachel Valinsky, staff of the publisher Wendy’s Subway), the literary scholar Jennifer Gayoung Lee credits Dictee with freeing her to ask, “What if I did not want to engage in the exhausting task of making my own personhood as a Korean American woman legible to anglophone readers? Could I choose otherwise?” The sociologist Youbin Kang’s essay in the same volume argues that the violence of “the ways that the dominant misrepresent, thwart and silence the marginalized…runs through Cha’s work and takes expressive form in the illegibility she produces,” in her refusal to defer to “those who hold the gaze: the colonizer, the elite, the capitalist, the male, and the white.”

Yet Cha’s extant statements, lectures, and editorial work all return to the idée fixe of communicating with an abstracted, depersonalized body of viewers and readers, leveraging the particularities of her experiences as a way to deliver them into that preverbal state she prized. Her mail-art piece Audience Distant Relative (1977–1978) consisted of envelopes that she mailed to the gallery each day and invited the audience to open, “as if they were personally addressed to them.” One text generalized her own experience of family separation across the two Koreas into a model for performer and reader:

you are the audience
you are my distant audience
i address you
as i would a distant relative
as if a distant relative
seen only heard only through someone else’s description

neither you nor i
are visible to each other
i can only assume that you can hear me
i can only hope that you hear me

As much of her own life as she poured into her work, she envisioned the autobiographical aspect of her art as only one half of a circuit into which the audience would also put something of themselves. She described her work as a reciprocal covenant, or interfusion: “The artist becoming object for the viewer, the viewer as subject, the artist as subject, and viewer as object.” Her content was often “highly personal, drawn from heritage, memory, et cetera.” But she imagined it creating “a space where the audience are left free to imagine, to remember their own memories… an intimate sharing, a collective experience.” She believed the artist was like a medium trying to locate “some collective key” that would help the viewer unlock the storehouse of shared human memory.

This interest in a shared human unconscious pervades Cha’s work. It emerged from an intellectual and political environment different from our own: Berkeley in the decade after 1968, where Marxism, feminism, and the nascent Asian American movement mixed with psychoanalysis and semiotics. As scholars in the field of Asian American studies frequently recount, it was only in May 1968 that the term “Asian American” entered widespread use, coined by Berkeley student activists in a bid to reject words such as “Oriental” and also unite different ethnic groups under a single banner.

That spring the newly-formed Asian American Political Alliance joined with other racial-minority organizations as a joint Third World Liberation Front to expand the previous year’s call for a Black Studies program into a demand for a Third World College. UC Berkeley called in police to break a strike over the issue in the spring semester of 1969, and created its Department of Ethnic Studies as a compromise measure. By fall the protest’s momentum had diffused, but the university that formed Cha over the next decade continued to grapple with the movement’s vision.

Histories and cultures beyond Europe wanted legitimation from artistic and academic institutions. One strategy was to decenter the West, proposing that thought from the “third world” might be just as central to all humankind as thought from any other location. Against this backdrop, it was reasonable for an ambitious young minority artist to imagine that art drawing on her particular ethnic and racial identity might contribute to the realization of an underlying human identity, might even be essential to it.

Cha took particular interest in Jung, Lacan, and Monique Wittig, all thinkers interested in the idea that myths echo in a shared human mind. For her, that also meant engaging the resources she could find on classical East Asia, scant as they sometimes were in that era: Zhuangzi dreaming about being a butterfly, sixteenth-century Korean poetry. Her early work draws on Korean culture gingerly, in subtle touches—Korean script, Korean religious dance—and both Dictee’s long passages explaining Korea’s history and the surviving materials for White Dust from Mongolia make clear that she drew more confidently on the country as she matured.

She proposed that White Dust from Mongolia would use images of Korea to evoke similar memories in any viewer. “The images and language emerge from sources that are highly personal in that they are accounts from memory, my personal memory as well as the viewer’s memory, therefore, hopefully, a collective reminiscing,” she writes in a funding application. “These given instances in Time attempt as catalysts to evoke other moments in the viewer’s memory.” Dictee places her telling of modern Korean history (then even less known in America than now) next to fragments of cave art, long sequences set in darkrooms and cinemas, and allusions to ancient Greece’s Eleusinian Mysteries.

She seemed to believe in access to a kind of communion through re-narration, or maybe even reincarnation. “Narrative shifts, discovers variation. Each observance prisoner of yet another observance, the illusion of variation hidden in yet another odor yet another shrouding, disguised, superimposed upon,” she muses in Dictee. “Like birth like death. Unlike birth, unlike death, this redeemed through a future and a past through own memory and presumes a separate conclusion.” She imagines herself speaking as a medium for Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, the teenage Korean independence fighter Yu Gwansun, her own mother, and Joan of Arc—her voice giving life to theirs, and their lives giving voice to hers. 

Underpinning much of this work was the conviction that one’s own particular cultural heritage could be the portal into a kind of universalism. That vision differs from today’s tendency to prioritize owning one’s culture and fending off potential appropriators. It also differs from Glissant’s emphasis on adopting a style opaque enough to escape the subjugating gaze of others. Cha’s universalism now draws less praise than her uncompromising difficulty. But her interest in Korean particularity as a door to universal relevance suggests that her difficulty served a goal other than opacity. At the very least, her version of visibility was a freely chosen one, not imposed by others’ prying eyes. It was part of a bid for equal dignity, elevating Korea—then still comparatively impoverished—to the same status as a source of pioneering art as New York or Paris. There’s one kind of chutzpah in saying that your art matters more to one community than others. There’s another, equally worthwhile kind in saying that your community’s story is and should be universally relevant and legible, if not easy.

The title “Multiple Offerings” comes from a sentence in the same artist statement where Cha writes about seeking the roots of language: “The focus is in producing Multiple Telling with Multiple Offering.” We normally take the opposite of opacity to be transparency. But Cha’s work suggests an alternative to transparency, with its attendant vulnerability: openness to multiple proliferating audiences across time and place, like the openness of a space filled with people, coming and going. Cha understood herself to be an exile, exilée—rooted in Korea but unable to return, living in America but never comfortable with its culture, fond of Europe but only a visitor there. That sense of exile, I think, laid the foundation for some of her openness to all comers willing to ponder her puzzles. Edward Said once wrote, of the literary critic Erich Auerbach, that great insight comes from exile, quoting the same medieval monk Auerbach often cited: “He is perfect to whom the entire world is as a foreign land.” Everywhere was foreign to Cha, including Korea when she returned to it as an adult. What is remarkable is that in the face of so many displacements, she kept offering so much, and remained open to the tellings she might receive in return.