Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, 1951-1982
Korean-America artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha was born in Busan, South Korea during the Korean War. Her family eventually moved to the United States in 1962, settling down in California. She received her B.A. and M.A. in Comparative Literature and an MFA from the University of California, Berkeley. After leaving university, she moved to Paris, France, where she studied filmmaking and critical theory before returning to the Bay Area as a filmmaker and performance artist. Cha was raped and killed by a security guard in New York City, New York, a week after the publication of her experimental novel, Dictee.
Although she lived only 31 years, Theresa Hak Kyung 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. 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.
Some links to sites which reference her work:
The Dream of the Audience - This is a site for the forthcoming documentary film about Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (currently in post-production). ****The film's Director/Producer - Woo Jung Cho - has recently contacted me. She is thinking about doing an instagram project about Cha & the film. She has offered an invitation to all of you (my students) who might be interested in taking, tagging, & posting photographs that relate to Dictee/Cha. If you are interested in this opportunity, just send me an e-mail, and I will get back to her with your interest.
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