The Dream of the Audience: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha

In an extensive retrospective, the Generali Foundation presented the work of the Korean-American artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (1951 Busan, KR–1982 New York, US) for the first time in Vienna and at the same time initiated the pending reception of this influential, previously virtually unknown work in Europe. Some of Cha’s works, including a central slide projection, were reconstructed by the Generali Foundation and shown again for the first time since the artist’s early death.

Born in Korea, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha emigrated to the USA with her family at the age of 13. She grew up in San Francisco and studied comparative literature and art at the University of California Berkeley from the late 1960s to the late 1970s. At the time, the entire Bay Area was a center for experimental art such as performance and video, and Berkeley was also the scene of student protests against the deployment of US troops in Vietnam.

Deeply affected by geographical exile as well as cultural and linguistic dislocation, the artist explored themes such as memory and alienation. Her extraordinarily poetic and conceptual works is characterized by her intensive engagement with language. She regarded language as the “common denominator” of her interest in literature, linguistics and film semiology, as the primary basis of her work. Cha, who was fluent in three languages, searched for “the roots of language before it is born on the tip of the tongue.” She used the learning of foreign languages beyond the function of a mere means of communication to analyze and experiment with “other relationships with language.”

Due to her studies in comparative literature, visual arts and film theory Theresa Hak Kyung Cha had an extensive intellectual background and strove for an artistic realization of theory. In the book she published in 1980, Apparatus. Cinematographic Apparatus: Selected Writings, which contains essential texts on film theory, Cha’s own contribution to this topic can be found in the middle section Commentaire.

Despite the different media Cha employed, her oeuvre seems consistent: literature in experimental lyrical form, handmade artist’s books, performances, slide projections, videos, films and installations—all media that enable processes and sequences and make them presentable, that allow one image to follow another, one sequence to follow another. While the individual media are used with great precision, the experimental use of text and image runs through all the works. In Dictée, a work in book form published in 1982 shortly after Cha’s early death, she uses English, French and Latin both in parallel and in individual words, interspersed with the Korean alphabet and illustrations. She pursues a similar practice in her videos, films, slide projections and performances, in which she aims to introduce a real, three-dimensional element as an alternative to the projected image.

In just a decade, Cha created a ground-breaking work whose relevance had only just been discovered at the time of the exhibition. What appears significant is the topicality informing this work. Migration and the cultural alienation that accompanies it have increasingly become the fate of countless people around the world and thus also the subject of works of art.