Theresa hak kyung cha biography channel

BERKELEY, Calif. — At age 12, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha emigrated from her birthplace of Korea in , two years after a military coup took over the south and a decade after the Korean War resulted in an armistice that divided the country in half. Cha’s family was, if not accustomed to living in diaspora, at least familiar with displacement and adapting to a new language and culture. Her parents grew up in Manchuria during the Japanese occupation of Korea and returned to their home country only during World War II. Korea remained an unstable and elusive homeland as Cha and her family eventually immigrated to the US and settled in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Cha’s family history and personal experience of migration would inform the prodigious output of live performance, video art, film, poetry, works on paper, and criticism she produced as a young artist and writer. In , she embarked on almost a decade of study at UC Berkeley, where she earned four degrees in literature and art, joined a community of artists, and emerged as a promising artist and scholar. Theresa Hak Kyung Cha: Avant Dictee at UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) brings together over 50 works of art from the museum’s collection, grouped by the 10 thematic chapters of Cha’s most famous published work, Dictee.

“Berkeley in the s and ’70s was a time of great change, and this was the case at UC Berkeley in particular,” BAMPFA assistant curator Stephanie Cannizzo told Hyperallergic in an email. “With the advent of new departments like Ethnic Studies and Women’s Studies, the university was broadening its mission to encompass a wider range of perspective

American author and artist (–)

In this Korean name, the family name is Cha.

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (Korean: 차학경; March 4, &#; November 5, ) was an Americannovelist, producer, director, and artist of South Korean origin, best known for her 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. 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, 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 when Cha was twelve years old, first settling in Hawaii and then relocating in 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 S

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s innovative oeuvre blurred distinctions between conceptual art, literature and film. A performance and multimedia artist, T. Cha addressed themes of displacement, language and intercultural identity through an interdisciplinary body of work, tracing feminist genealogies and straddling an array of media, yet always returning to the written word to expose language’s identity-shaping power alongside its intrinsic limitations. T. Cha was a polyglot: she grew up speaking Korean and immigrated to the United States with her family at the age of 12, where she acquired English and began learning French, which she would continue to study at the University of California, Berkeley (–) and abroad in Paris (). T. Cha’s family was forced to uproot repeatedly, fleeing the Japanese occupation of Korea and the Korean War. T. Cha’s mother grew up in Manchuria, and the family later moved back to Korea and finally to the United States, settling in San Francisco.

T. Cha earned four degrees in comparative literature and art while at Berkeley, and became a practicing artist during this time, staging performances such as Barren Cave Mute (), in which the three words of the title were written on long pieces of wax paper, slowly revealed as the flame of a candle melted the wax. In an eight-minute black-and-white video work titled Mouth to Mouth (), a mouth forms an ‘O’ shape and then closes as English and Korean words appear on the screen, alluding to the beginnings of language acquisition and identity formation.

During T. Cha’s parents’ childhood under Japanese rule, it was forbidden to speak the Korean language, an example of linguistic erasure that she would reflect on in her magnum opus Dictée, published in Sometimes referred to as an artist’s book, other times as an experimental novel or poetry collection, Dictée defies categorisation, just as T. Cha herself slipped between identities. Radically embracing complexity, Dictée is a lifelo

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha was born on March 4, , in Busan, South Korea. A poet, performance, and multimedia artist, Cha was one of five children. Her family fled four invasions—first to Manchuria, then Seoul, and then to Busan, where Cha was born. They moved to San Francisco in , when Cha was twelve. At age fourteen, she won a school poetry contest. Cha received her BA and MA in comparative literature and an MFA from the University of California, Berkeley, where she studied French, film theory, performance, and multimedia art.

Cha worked in many mediums—film, sculpture, photography, performance, and poetry among them. She was fluent in French, Korean, and English, and was heavily influenced by Marguerite Duras, Stéphane Mallarmé, Jean-Luc Godard, Samuel Beckett, and Carl Dreyer. She was the author of numerous art books and performances, as well as the poetry collection Dictee (Tanem Press, ) and the films Vidéoème and Permutations. She also edited the essay collection Apparatus: Cinematographic Apparatus: Selected Writings (Tanam Press, ).

Of her work, poet Timothy Yu says, “Dictee’s mix of narrative, poetry, and images destabilizes historical and biographical narratives in favor of a concentration on the workings of language.”

Cha moved to New York City in , where she worked as an artist, editor, and writer. She was assaulted and murdered on November 5, , one week after the publication of Dictee. Her work has been shown and studied as a cornerstone of contemporary literature and performance.