Theresa Hak Kyung Cha: Multiple Offerings

by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (Artist)

416 pages, Paperback

Published March 31, 2026

About the author

Most famous for her experimental memoir/novel, Dictee, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha is a Korean American writer, filmmaker and performance artist. She was born in Pusan, Korea, during the Korean War, but relocated with her parents to San Francisco, California. The interdisciplinary nature of Dictee, which combines narrative, poetry, movie stills, family photos and an array of other genres and forms, and written in various languages, reflects her own varied education. She attended the University of California at Berkeley, where she earned both an M.F.A. and M.A. (in Comparative Literature). She later relocated to Paris, France, where she studied film and brushed elbows with a number of well-known French filmmakers.

Her life was cut tragically short when, in 1982, just a few days after the publication of Dictee, she was raped and murdered by a stranger in New York City. Dictee received little critical attention until the 1990s, when it was republished by Third Woman Press, but it is now regarded as a classic work of autobiography and a powerful commentary upon American hybridity.

Reviews

[Randy Wilson · Rating 5 out of 5]

I came to Cha via Dictee her last completed work before her murder in 1982. That book, a compilation of poetry, prose, calligraphy, photography and collage elements struck me deeply. I was excited to attend her exhibit at BAMPFA and purchased this catalog.

It is very difficult to explain the power of Cha because the nature of her work is fragmentation, multiplicity and repetition. It is a vision I must sit with and open myself to before its power carries me away trance-like into another realm.

Multiple offerings is a useful way of thinking about Cha. She works with film, textiles, poetry, performance art. She breaks apart language, offers meanings in multiple languages and multiple meanings for the same word. She explores communication before words are even formed via sound and diagrams the human body as an apparatus for making sound.

Speaking of ‘Apparatus’ this was the name she gave a collection of writings by film experts and practitioners that focuses on the film strip, the projector, the screen and the viewer. In this collection and for this exhibit, Cha emphasizes how the audience adds their own layer to art. The audience is a broad concept that includes not just the people enjoying the work in the present but future audiences and even ancestors.

I will end with a poem that captures Cha’s spirituality and her artistic method:

Be this word
Some where be fore this word
Between this word
Just before this word
Even before
Word begins just
Before
This word said
This word written
Before sound formed the gesture
The last breath taken before uttered
Before reaching ears
When it leaves
Before the wind becomes felt
And end there
And not end there at all