The Berkeley Artwork Museum and Pacific Movie Archive in California will current a retrospective for the late artist and author Theresa Hak Kyung Cha subsequent 12 months, making it the primary present of its type in twenty years.
The exhibition, titled “A number of Choices” and on view from January to April 2026, would be the largest to this point devoted to Cha, who died in 1982 at age 31. The exhibition will then go on a nationwide and worldwide tour, with venues to be introduced later this 12 months.
BAMPFA has been the house to a lot of Cha’s artwork and archives for over three many years. The forthcoming exhibition will characteristic many beforehand unseen works alongside her well-known items.
“Cha is a reasonably elusive artist for many individuals,” BAMPFA senior curator Victoria Sung, who’s organizing the present with curatorial affiliate Tausif Noor, advised ARTnews in an interview. “She’s an artist who defies straightforward categorization.”
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha in 1979.
Photograph James Cha/Berkeley Artwork Museum and Pacific Movie Archive, Reward of the Theresa Hak Kyung Cha Memorial Basis
Cha is broadly recognized for Dictee, her 1982 e book that blends poetry, memoir, and different codecs. Revealed simply earlier than her homicide, Dictee has lengthy been extra broadly recognized that Cha’s artwork. Sung mentioned the “hybridity” of Dictee is a mannequin for understanding Cha’s observe as an entire, with the retrospective aiming to “increase it to the whole lot of the observe.”
“She was making ceramics, fiber artwork, pictures, video, efficiency, text-based artwork—you identify it,” Sung mentioned. “Individuals have not often had an opportunity to see greater than a handful of her works at one time, in order that was a giant motivation for doing a retrospective, the place we might pull out the majority of what we’ve got at BAMPFA when it comes to her artwork and archives, and present sort of the fullness of our observe, the interdisciplinarity of her observe.”
Sung mentioned that presenting the entire of her observe stays a problem. “I knew she was elusive, and I knew her work was elusive,” she famous. “However at the same time as I used to be going by way of the archives and every of the works one after the other, it nonetheless is tough to categorize. By that I imply that even immediately, after we’re rather more comfy with interdisciplinarity, when Cha was making work within the ’70s and early ’80s, she actually didn’t match right into a neat class.”
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Faire-Half, 1976.
Berkeley Artwork Museum and Pacific Movie Archive, Reward of the Theresa Hak Kyung Cha Memorial Basis
The exhibition can be accompanied by a completely illustrated catalog, edited by Sung and that includes essays by Julia Bryan-Wilson, Jordan Carter, Danielle A. Jackson, Mia Kang, and Mason Leaver-Yap. Along with serving as a document of the retrospective, the catalog will embody documentation of Cha’s archive, together with supplies that aren’t being exhibited. The catalog can even characteristic further quick texts targeted on completely different themes and sides of Cha, permitting readers to “dip out and in of the e book as you may with an archive,” Sung mentioned.
Sung, who joined the museum in 2023, had proposed a Cha retrospective throughout her interview course of. “For me, BAMPFA has been synonymous with Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, given how in depth its holdings are of her artwork and archives,” she mentioned. “I knew that BAMPFA, and actually solely BAMPFA, might mount to retrospective because of this.”
That intention struck BAMPFA govt director Julie Rodrigues Widholm, who joined the museum in 2020 with the intention of focusing the museum on mounting “the reveals that solely we might do—proper now,” she advised ARTnews. “Theresa Hak Kyung Cha is clearly an space of energy in our assortment, and the exhibition was one thing that no different museum might do the way in which that we will do it. It additionally felt like time to revisit the work.”
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Permutations, 1976.
Berkeley Artwork Museum and Pacific Movie Archive, Reward of the Theresa Hak Kyung Cha Memorial Basis
Sung mentioned she feels Cha’s work is lengthy overdue for one more retrospective, the final being organized by BAMPFA in 2001. “Since that point, a completely new era of artists and researchers have discovered their approach to her work,” she mentioned. “She’s a type of artists, who has been both straight referenced or obliquely referenced by so many artists in a method that I haven’t seen to an analogous extent.”
Renée Inexperienced created works within the late ’90s Cha, whereas extra not too long ago artists like Na Mira and Cici Wu have each made film-based set up works that goal to carry Cha’s reminiscence into the current. All three artists’ work will characteristic within the upcoming BAMPFA retrospective in a piece trying on the artist’s affect. BAMPFA mentioned that over 75 % of the analysis requests it receives general are associated to Cha’s archive and artworks it owns, which her household donated to the museum in 1992, two years after it mounted the late artist’s first solo exhibition and a decade after her loss of life.
“When I discovered that out,” Sung mentioned, “I simply understood how a lot need there’s to study extra about this artist, notably amongst youthful generations of Asian diasporic artists, so in some methods, you may say that artists, partially, led me to prepare the retrospective.”
Extra not too long ago, her work has obtained wider consideration after years of it not being seen. In 2022, an set up devoted to Cha’s multidisciplinary work was prominently featured in that 12 months’s Whitney Biennial, and the Hessel Museum of Artwork at CCS Bard mounted a survey of Cha as a part of its “Interference” program, for graduate thesis exhibitions. Then, in 2023, her work was included within the twelfth Seoul Mediacity Biennale on the Seoul Museum of Artwork.
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, White Mud From Mongolia, 1980.
Berkeley Artwork Museum and Pacific Movie Archive, Reward of the Theresa Hak Kyung Cha Memorial Basis
Cathy Park Hong’s 2021 e book Minor Emotions: An Asian American Reckoning, which has a chapter devoted to Cha, additionally introduced renewed consideration to the artist. Within the e book, Hong writes, “Cha treats language as each the wound and the instrument that wounds; hers is a language that conceals slightly than reveals identification. In her artwork initiatives, she regards phrases, whether or not in English or French or Korean, as textural objects, inflexible as a rubber stamp, arcane as a stone engraving, not as a part of her, however other than her.”
In an e-mail to ARTnews, Hong added, “Theresa Hak Kyung Cha has been underrecognized each within the artwork and literary neighborhood for many years. It’s solely now that her groundbreaking interdisciplinary work is getting worldwide recognition. However it’s particularly poignant that BAMPFA is doing the solo present. Berkeley was Cha’s mental house. This was the place she got here of age as a poet and artist so it’s extraordinary that they’re mounting this solo present for her.”
Cha immigrated to the US from South Korea in 1964 along with her household, settling within the Bay Space, the place she was deeply affect by the counterculture and avant-garde scenes lively on the time. She attended the College of California, Berkeley, which homes BAMPFA, from 1969 to 1978, the place she earned two bachelor’s levels (in comparative literature and artwork) and two grasp’s levels (an MA and MFA in artwork). She additionally labored at BAMPFA (then often known as the College Artwork Museum) as an artwork handler and movie usher.
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Aveugle Voix, 1975, efficiency documentation, at 63 Bluxome Avenue, San Francisco.
Berkeley Artwork Museum and Pacific Movie Archive, Reward of the Theresa Hak Kyung Cha Memorial Basis
What distinguishes the 2026 present from BAMPFA’s 2001 one was the previous’s concentrate on together with “completed” artworks by Cha. “After going by way of the archives,” Sung mentioned, “what we realized was that this notion of completeness is an virtually arbitrary designation with regards to an artist like Cha as a result of she was continually iterating on her artworks throughout mediums. I hope that the exhibition will emphasize the fluidity of our observe in that method.”
