Isabelle Utzinger-Son

On Theresa Hak Kyung Cha

March 4, 2026Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s “Multiple Offerings” is on view at BAMPFA, Berkeley through April 19, 2026.

Six white envelopes hang on the walls. On their outsides are phrases printed in large black letters: “audience distant relative,” “letter sendereceiver,” “object/subject,” “messenger,” “between delivery,” “echo.” Below them, a vitrine displays the messages they once contained:

you are the audience
you are my distant audience
i address you
as i would a distant relative
seen only heard only through someone else’s description
Over a week in 1977, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (1951–82) posted this sequence of letters to Galerie Loa in the Netherlands. Each day, a new envelope was opened by the gallery’s visitors and, as per Cha’s instructions, read “as if they were personally addressed to them, involving the same gestures that everyone goes through when one receives a letter.” Here, next to the displayed letters, a small speaker emits Cha’s voice, softly uttering the contents of her dispatches. However, in the attempt to match her recital with its corresponding text, it becomes clear that that spoken word diverges from its written counterpart ever so slightly––a misalignment so subtle, one might brush it off as mere slippage.

At 12, Cha migrated with her family from Busan to Hawai‘i before settling in San Francisco, where she attended Catholic school and learned English, French, and Latin, later immersing herself in performance and post-structural theory at UC Berkeley.

An Asian woman artist who came of age in a burgeoning West Coast avant-garde scene marked by political upheaval—and who was killed in an act of femicide at the age of 31—Cha’s biography frequently shapes conversations about her work. The narrative of the immigrant artist “silenced too soon” is difficult to divorce from her practice, partly because her work insists on linguistic multiplicity and fragmentation, and partly because identity politics have so effectively used voice to foreground representation.

As relevant as Cha’s biographical narrative is to a contextual understanding of the work she made, it does not exhaust the questions her art poses, nor does it fully explain why her work continues to resonate so widely today.

The mail art piece audience distant relative offers possible answers. Nestled among the works on display at BAMPFA as part of “Multiple Offerings,” her first major retrospective since 2001, the piece was made when language-based practices were reshaping the terms of conceptual art. Cha initially conceived it as an artist’s book alongside her longstanding collaborator Reese Williams, who would publish her best-known work, Dictée, five years later. The work’s textual components alone stage an embodied encounter: an “I” addresses a “you” that, for all the anonymity such pronouns imply, nonetheless produces a charged intimacy. On the other hand, the recorded voice—financial constraints led Cha to realize the piece as a postcard work, to which she later added the recording—registers less as personal expression than as bodily presence: one hears not only language, but, in the slight misalignment between voice and text, a throat, a breath.

Art after the 1960s often treated the voice as a means of reclaiming embodied presence, particularly within feminist performances that foregrounded speech as a site of political self-articulation. Cha instead exposed its semantic and material instability. In her prolific practice—spanning film and video, performance, artist books, and textiles—the voice appears both implicitly and explicitly: as the French word “voix” written across a blindfold that she ties over her eyes in Aveugle Voix (1975); as a purely physical presence in Mouth to Mouth (1975), where a close-up of a mouth silently forms the vowels and consonants of the Korean alphabet; or as an incorporeal voice-over in her unfinished film and novel White Dust from Mongolia (1980). Audience distant relative exemplifies the tensions that define Cha’s practice: the pull between distance and intimacy; the presence of the body even in its apparent absence; the simultaneous cleaving and binding of voice and language.

In Dictée, her last completed work, and the work through which her practice is most often understood, Cha would pose this experiment more fully. Published one week after her murder in New York City, Dictée is a book that frustrates any preconceived notions of how a so-called literary voice ought to behave.

Structured into quasi-chapters named after the nine muses, it addresses Cha’s mother, an exiled teacher in the Manchurian puppet state; re-tells the martyrdom of Yu Gwan Sun, the sixteen-year-old leader of the independence movement against Japan's colonial rule; and chronicles Cha's first return to Korea, a visit that coincided with, and was abruptly ended by, the violence of the Gwangju uprising in 1980. Interspersed with images—portraits of her mother; her namesake St. Thérèse of Lisieux; Renée Falconetti as Joan of Arc— Dictée is neither fixed in chronology nor governed by narrative coherence. Rather, it collapses historical specificity and refuses to reveal its speaking subject.

If Dictée can feel demanding, this has less to do with its impenetrability than with its heightened demands on attention. Although it meditates on the generational effects of political displacement, nationalism, and hegemonic power, it is just as concerned with the modes of its telling. Written in English and French, at times in simultaneous translation, it incorporates Latin incantations, Chinese calligraphy, and a single appearance of Korean hangul. Dictée offers no clear interpretation of Korea’s history of colonization, nor does it propose lessons to be drawn from reading it. Instead, the most immediate issue it raises is that of linguistic attribution, and consequently, of national projection: the extent to which its reader seeks to assign an identity to the voice that speaks.

This attentiveness to language as material is an abiding feature in Cha's work. In the three-channel video Passages Paysages (1978), English and Korean voiceovers move across a carefully orchestrated sequence of black-and-white images—family portraits, Korean landscapes, Californian interiors, hands, and closed envelopes. Words softly fade in and out: passages dissolves into paysages (passage into landscape); éteindre and allumer (to extinguish; to light) surface alongside images of a blown-out candle. In this instance, Cha’s voice enters this visual field, speaking in Korean, and asking to “turn off,” “turn on,” and “don’t turn on the light now.” As image and text imply a fragile correspondence, the written and spoken word mutate from one national register to another, asking how linguistic borders–whether semantic or national—can really function as fixed markers of difference.

Dictée is frequently labeled a genre-busting, feminist memoir. While it has rightfully become a central text within Asian-American and postcolonial literary discourse, such approaches are symptomatic of the biographical contexts regularly brought to bear on her work. Yet Cha herself has not explicitly framed her relationship with language as one of belonging. “Since having been forced to learn foreign languages more ‘consciously’ at a later age, there has existed a different perception and orientation toward language,” she writes in a 1978 artist statement. I pause on her use of the word “consciously.” It resounds as a shift in perception, rather than a discovery of language's inherent limits—I hear Cha recognizing an opening to perceive her own voice unmoored from the constraints of linguistic belonging.

A central question in post-structural thought comes to mind here: How much do the environment we are born into and the language we use every day dictate not only what we think but what we can think?

At UC Berkeley, where she obtained a degree in Comparative Literature and three in Fine Arts, Cha’s conceptual experimentation, like that of many of her peers, was shaped by Barthes’s pronouncement of the author’s death. But rather than taking his claim that “the voice loses its origin, the author enters his own death, writing begins” as a terminal gesture, for Cha, it presented an opening to writing untethered from the temporal and spatial fixity that origin promises but cannot secure. Her engagement with Marguerite Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian (1951) suggested that autobiography could transform into meditation on history—that a singular life might access transhistorical time. Yourcenar’s Memoirs is an epistolary monologue written from the deathbed of the Roman emperor. What likely drew Cha to the book was the relational paradox at the heart of both their projects: a portrayal of “man existing alone and yet closely bound with all being.”

How does one formalize such a paradox—to be alone yet bound, singular yet relational? For all the words that appear in Cha's work, her answer lay in searching for a language that comes into existence before it leaves the body as speech. As she wrote, “My work is with Language, ‘looking for the roots of language before it is born on the tip of the tongue’.”
When I first read this bewildering sentence, I recalled seeing an image of Cha, her eyes and mouth covered with a blindfold marked “Aveugle” (blind) and “Voix” (voice). The performance Aveugle Voix, presented in 1975 at the artist-run space 63 Bluxome, sees Cha moving through a sequence of gestures, blind and mute, as she unfurls a banner that reveals the phrases “Me Fail Words;” “Mot Sans;” “Voix Sans;” “Aveugle” and “Geste.” Dressed in white, she then crouches and hovers over the text, establishing contact between the body and the word. The work is often regarded as a nod to the Free Speech Movement, which saw UC Berkeley’s campus lined with protest signs before her time there. I see Cha, dressed in white, merging with the banner. Background rather than figure, surface rather than speaker, she appears to be caught in her search for language’s roots.

At a time when voice is increasingly instrumentalized as identity, Cha’s approach feels prescient.

She engaged the theoretical realm with spiritual practices which shaped her understanding of language as unbound by any deterministic pull. A dedicated practitioner of Tai Chi, she cultivated a relation to language grounded in self-emptying rather than expression, bringing post-structural critiques of authorship into alignment with Daoist concepts of the unpossessed self. As a result, Cha works in a language that resists both representation and mastery. In Dictée’s opening section, titled “DISEUSE,” which Trinh T. Minh-Ha has translated as “thought-woman, spider-woman, griotte, storyteller, fortune-teller, witch”—an anonymous “she” attempts to speak without ever fully arriving at speech. “She mimics the speaking. That might resemble speech,” Cha writes. The voice that emerges hovers at the threshold of language, articulating a position in which speaking is no longer the assertion of a subject but part of an ongoing search for language itself. Where there is no identifiable narrator, there is address; where there is no story, there is duration; where there is no stable subject, there is voice.

My eyes wander across BAMPFA’s maroon walls, a shade that references Dictée’s original cover and was chosen by Cha and Williams to match the robes of Tibetan monks. The color filters through a white cheese cloth, in front of which a monitor plays her early student performance untitled (candle performance) (1973). It frames the face of a young Theresa, dressed in white, as she steps into an indeterminable space. Candles are placed on three table rows; she lights them, one by one. She reads a text––a voice that, for all its subdued monotony, is unmistakably hers. Then she disappears, only to return and extinguish the candles she just lit. In the room now devoid of light, she mouths the same words again: “Within sound within emptiness.” She silently mimics herself. Yet, in the absence of spoken words, an unspoken presence perseveres.