Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (; March 4, 1951 – November 5, 1982) was an American novelist, producer, director, and artist of South Korean origin, best known for her 1982 novel, Dictée. Considered an avant-garde artist, Cha was fluent in Korean, English, and French. The main body of Cha's work is "looking for the roots of language before it is born on the tip of the tongue." Cha's practice experiments with language through repetition, manipulation, reduction, and isolation, exploring the ways in which language marks one's identity, in unstable and multiple expressions.Jeon, Min Sun. Audience Distant Relative: On the Critical Reception of the Works of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (MA thesis, Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, 2022) 8. Cha's interdisciplinary background was clearly evident in Dictée, which experiments with juxtaposition and hypertext of both print and visual media. Cha's Dictée is frequently taught in contemporary literature classes including women's literature.

Early life Cha was born in Busan, South Korea during the Korean War. She was the middle child of five, with two older and two younger siblings,Lewallen, Constance M. "Audience Distant Relative: An Introduction to the Writings of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha." Exilee; Temps morts; selected works. Berkeley: University of California Press: University of California, Berkeley art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (2009), 1. to Hyung Sang Cha (father) and Hyung Soon Cha (mother), who were both raised in Manchuria during Japan’s occupation of Korea and China, and forced to learn and work in Japanese.

Cha and her family emigrated to the United States in 1962 when Cha was twelve years old, first settling in Hawaii and then relocating in 1964 to the San Francisco Bay Area, where she attended Convent of the Sacred Heart High School. During her time there, Cha studied French language, and French, Greek, and Roman classics. She also sang in the choir at Sacred Heart. By the time she graduated Cha had earned many scholastic awards, including a poetry contest prize at the age of fourteen, two years after she started learning English.

Education Before committing to University of California Berkeley, Cha briefly attended the University of San Francisco for a semester. She transferred to UC Berkeley the following year, where she completed her studies in art and writing. As an art student, she initially concentrated on ceramic sculpture. However, she was soon introduced to the then new medium of performance, and subsequently embarked on a series of performances as protagonist, all accompanied by her live or recorded spoken words. One of her classmates at Berkeley was artist Yong Soon Min.

As a student, she became close friends with Dennis Love, another student, and Bertrand Augst, a professor of French and comparative literature. Her classes with Augst inspired Cha to study comparative literature, in which she later earned degrees. Teachers and friends have stated that Cha enjoyed reading broadly, anything from Korean poetry to European modernist and postmodern literature. She received her Bachelor's degree in comparative literature in 1973 and a second Bachelor's degree in art in 1975, both from Berkeley.

During this time, the Free Speech Movement and anti-war movement of the 1970s resulted in an air of political and social upheaval for Berkeley students demanding socio-political change.Lewallen, Constance. "Jim Melchert with Constance Lewallen," The Brooklyn Rail, December 2020 - January 2021, (accessed April 30, 2023), https://brooklynrail.org/2020/12/art/JIM-MELCHERT-with-Constance-Lewallen The unrest fed into the experimentation of conceptual art movements of the Bay Area. Performance art became particularly strong in the Bay Area during Cha's schooling in the 1970s, as one of many new genres being explored by artists seeking to escape the restraints of traditional art forms, with a revolutionary spirit related to the radical political and cultural shifts taking place. Though Cha was not an active participant in protest activities, she drew on the experimental qualities they represented, without her work itself being overtly socio-political.Lewallen, Constance M. "Audience Distant Relative: An Introduction to the Writings of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha." Exilee; Temps morts; selected works. Berkeley: University of California Press: University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (2009), 2 Cha worked as a student employee of the Pacific Film Archive for three years between 1974 and 1977 while earning two graduate degrees in art (MA, 1977; MFA, 1978).

Cha's MFA thesis Paths (1978) highlighted the critical role of the viewer as the receptor and activator of her work. In it, she notes: "The viewer holds the position as the complement, an avenue, through multiple interpretations, give [sic] multiple dimensions to the work. If the work has the strength (this is very subjective) the renewal and regenerating processes could be illimitable."Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, "Paths" (MFA thesis, University of California, Berkeley, 1978), (Theresa Hak Kyung Cha Archive, University Art Museum, University of California, Berkeley). Thus for Cha, the "viewer" of the work is not merely a passive subject; they are the "complement" or "avenue" that keeps the work alive with perpetual regeneration.Jeon, Min Sun. Audience Distant Relative: On the Critical Reception of the Works of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (MA thesis, Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, 2022) 2.

As a graduate student, she became close friends with faculty member Jim Melchert, and even became his teaching assistant in 1976. As Cha's interest in film grew, she studied at Berkeley under Bertrand Augst, who recalls her interest in poetry written by Stéphane Mallarmé and plays by Samuel Beckett. According to Augst, Cha felt an affinity with Mallarmé's associative and restrained use of language. Beckett's highly reductive style of theater found echoes in the spare setting of Cha's performances. More than the stylistic influence of Beckett or Mallarmé, Cha's studies of film theory with Augst had perhaps the greatest effect on her development. From these studies, Cha hoped to integrate film theory into her art practice. In an application for an extension of her grant to study in Paris, Cha wrote: "It is essential for me to see the possibilities of Film-making as an expression closely tied with other expressions supported by its theory as Reference to see the application of theory to actual works followed by a re-recognition, 'realization' of the theory in practice."Rinder, Lawrence. "The Plurality of Entrances, the Opening of Networks, the Infinity of Languages." The Dream of the Audience: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (1951-1982). Berkeley: University of California Press (2001), 23.

In 1976, Cha decided to pursue a degree in film theory at the UC Education Abroad Program, Centre d'Etudes Americain du Cinema, in Paris. During her stay she studied under Jean-Louis Baudry, Raymond Bellour, Monique Wittig, and Christian Metz. Her encounter with their theories culminated in her editing an anthology of writings entitled Apparatus/Cinematographic Apparatus: Selected Writings (Tanam Press, 1980), which includes articles by Roland Barthes, Jean-Louis Baudry, Theirry Kuntzel, Christian Metz, Bertrand Augst, and others as well as a piece by Cha herself, a major work based on word deconstruction titled Commentaire.Jeon, Min Sun. Audience Distant Relative: On the Critical Reception of the Works of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (MA thesis, Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, 2022), 12. In the filmic, multipage text, Cha deconstructs the French word commentaire into French and English components and homonyms (comment, taire, commentary, tear, etc.).Lewallen, Constance M. "Audience Distant Relative: An Introduction to the Writings of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha." Exilee; Temps morts; selected works. Berkeley: University of California Press: University of California, Berkeley art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (2009), 3. In her preface for the book, Cha states: "The intention is to identify the individual components and complete film apparatus, the interdependent operations comprising the film, the author of the film, the spectator... The essential element of the project is to reveal the process of film and make accessible the theoretical writings and materials of filmmakers."Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Apparatus, Cinematographic Apparatus: Selected Writings (New York: Tanam Press, 1980), cited in Min Sun Jeon, Audience Distant Relative: On the Critical Reception of the Works of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (MA thesis, Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, 2022), 12.

While studying in Paris, Cha spent a short time in Amsterdam and met a group of artists, most of whom were from Iceland. One of whom was Ulises Carrion, a poet, author of artists' books, video and filmmaker who founded Other Books and So in Amsterdam, where Cha exhibited her artist book, presence/absence (1975) in 1977.Jim Melchert, email correspondence with author, Jan 11, 2022, cited in Min Sun Jeon, Audience Distant Relative: On the Critical Reception of the Works of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (MA thesis, Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, 2022), 14.

Career and personal life

Cha began her career as a performance artist, producer, director, and writer in 1974. She also worked as an usher and cashier from 1974 to 1977 at the Pacific Film Archive, with friends. She was known to study and practice mainly in the Bay Area as well as Paris and New York.

In 1979, Cha traveled back to South Korea for the first time in seventeen years. She had long expressed great anticipation to return in her book Exilée, where she describes the flight in terms of the sixteen time zones that separate San Francisco from Seoul. As a major event in her life and work, her family's exile from Korea in 1963 was a subject she treated often symbolically, representing displacement through shifts and ruptures in the visual and linguistic forms of her work. In a broad group of works, Cha engages a variety of theoretical models to articulate the experience of displacement.Rinder, Lawrence. "The Plurality of Entrances, the Opening of Networks, the Infinity of Languages." The Dream of the Audience: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (1951-1982). Berkeley: University of California Press (2001), 15. That year in 1979, Cha also performed her work Other Things Seen, Other Things Heard at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, attracting the attention of Robert Atkins, art critic for the San Francisco Bay Guardian.

In August 1980, Cha moved to New York City, working as an editor and writer for Tanam Press. Earlier that year, she also traveled to Japan and then back to South Korea, this time working on the film White Dust From Mongolia from May to July 1980 with her brother. They were never able to finish the film due to the dangerous political situation in South Korea at the time. South Korea's President Park Chung Hee had just been assassinated the previous year and restrictive new laws had been declared. The Chas were harassed by South Korean officials who thought they might be North Korean spies.

In 1981, Cha began teaching video art at Elizabeth Seton College while working in the design department of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She was awarded an artist's residence at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in 1982. She married photographer Richard Barnes in May 1982; the two had met in a drawing class in 1975, during her time at UC Berkeley.

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