California<\/a> avant-garde art scene throughout the 1970s.<\/p>\nTheresa Hak Kyung Cha in 1979. Photograph: Photograph by James H Cha. Gift of the Theresa Hak Kyung Cha Memorial Foundation<\/p>\n
The Berkeley Art Museum became the home of Cha\u2019s art and archives in 1992, following an exhibition of her work that inspired her heirs to donate the materials to that institution. Subsequent shows of Cha\u2019s work occurred during the 1990s, notably at New York\u2019s Whitney Museum, with the first major retrospective in 2001 at the Berkeley Art Museum. According to Sung, another major retrospective was long overdue.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe was engaging with the diaspora in a really interesting way that many artists weren\u2019t at the time,\u201d Sung said. \u201cShe was inserting her body, languaging, memory, familial history, cultural heritage, the untranslatable \u2013 she was engaging with all these themes in the 70s and 80s. It\u2019s really only today that artists and audiences are catching up to the work she was making. It still feels incredibly relevant and contemporary.\u201d<\/p>\n
Multiple Offerings goes back to Cha\u2019s beginnings, starting with pottery she made as an art student at UC Berkeley and her early work Mouth to Mouth, a video showing an extreme closeup of Cha mouthing the vowels of the Korean language. Cha was exploring her fascination with how the sounds of language translate into meaning, as well as the notion of displacement, a central theme of her career. According to Sung, coming to the US and learning English as an adolescent prompted Cha to reflect on aspects of language that most take for granted.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe was able to think through language from a more detached point of view because she was learning it later in life,\u201d Sung said. \u201cIt was something she was very cognizant of \u2013 she had her own understanding of what it is to learn a language and to be able to speak or not.\u201d<\/p>\n
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha \u2013 Still from White Dust From Mongolia, 1980. Photograph: Cha, Theresa Hak Kyung\/Gift of the Theresa Hak Kyung Cha Memorial Foundation<\/p>\n
Multiple Offerings presents numerous film and video pieces, including Permutations, likely Cha\u2019s most famous work after Dict\u00e9e, and Exil\u00e9e, a simultaneous film and video installation. The show also grants ample space to artistic responses to Cha\u2019s work, among them Now Pretend by the Black queer artist L Franklin Gilliam, a video exploration of the intersection of identity, self-presentation, and the enactment of race, and Rain Dreamed by Sound by the Chilean artist Cecilia Vicu\u00f1a, a sound installation eulogizing Cha and coming to terms with her murder in the larger context of violence against women. In the piece, Vicu\u00f1a recalls with sadness: \u201cI was just about to meet her when she was murdered. \/ I was just a few blocks away, with other Heresies women, but her cry didn\u2019t reach us. \/ We couldn\u2019t hear the cry coming from the soul of all raped women. \/ The cry that was becoming a wave, a wave of sorrow asking us to stop \/ the next crime.\u201d<\/p>\n
Bringing in the work of other artists is part Multiple Offerings\u2019s purpose, to demonstrate just how much Cha\u2019s work has resonated with artists in the decades since her death. In her position as a curator of contemporary art, Sung has witnessed Cha\u2019s transform into a vital presence permeating through the artistic culture. \u201cI think it\u2019s quite rare for an artist to have such a large impact on so many different younger generations of artists working in so many different ways,\u201d Sung said. \u201cThat\u2019s where the impetus of the exhibition came from.\u201d<\/p>\n
Multiple Offerings also presents Cha as a true creative force, a person who found her artistic calling early in life and seemed to pursue it with utter confidence. \u201cIt\u2019s very clear that from a very early stage she was very serious as an artist,\u201d Sung said. \u201cShe believed in art wholeheartedly from the beginning.\u201d A series of photos documenting her 1975 performance piece A Ble Wail \u2013 made when Cha was in her early 20s \u2013 show a performer gamely holding sway over the Worth Ryder Art Gallery that she inhabits. Her typewritten description of the performance boldly declares her intention: \u201cIn this piece, I want to be the dream of the audience.\u201d Another collection of photos documents an untitled 1974 performance in which Cha burns 10ft-high sheets of paper that she has written single words on. \u201cNot everyone would do that sort of stuff,\u201d Sung said. \u201cShe was dead serious and just had an admirable confidence.\u201d<\/p>\n
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha \u2013 Aveugle Voix, 1975 Photograph: Cha, Theresa Hak Kyung\/Photograph by Trip Callaghan. Gift of the Theresa Hak Kyung Cha Memorial Foundation<\/p>\n
As much as Cha was a prodigy, Multiple Offerings also documents how the UC campus and Berkeley Art Museum offered much inspiration for her creativity. \u201cThe arts practice department was very open in its pedagogy,\u201d Sung said. \u201cJim Melchert talks about how he really encouraged his sculpture students to really approach the UC campus as their studio. Cha was using fiber and twigs that she had gathered from the campus in her weavings.\u201d Through the museum, she was also able to become deeply involved in the Bay Area avant-garde art scene, which Sung characterized as one of artists thoroughly investing themselves into one another\u2019s creative lives and enjoying a scene of profound creative fluidity. \u201cThey were testing out and experimenting with different forms of making for one another at a time when nothing was really defined,\u201d Sung said. \u201cThe Bay Area was really this hub of conceptual arts performance and working outside of institutional spaces.\u201d<\/p>\n
To stand within the galleries of Multiple Offerings is to feel an inspiration that comes from the excitement and openness of an art world that in many ways feels distant from today, one in which a Korean immigrant could spend nearly a decade at a public university and make art that no one had ever seen before. Sung intends Multiple Offerings to be a revelation to audiences, showing them just how much Cha went beyond the boundaries that define the art world \u2013 and that they can likewise open their own minds. \u201c I wanted to dissolve the boundaries as much as I could because she\u2019s not an artist who thought in that way,\u201d Sung said. \u201cHer practice was really so open-ended, and so I\u2019m hoping that it just signals an opening for artists researchers, and other students, people who are interested in learning and wanting to engage.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"If there\u2019s one thing the late avant-garde artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha is known for, it\u2019s almost certainly…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":419960,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[6225,6485,6486,1120,96,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-419959","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-design","tag-entertainment","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/419959","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=419959"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/419959\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/419960"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=419959"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=419959"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=419959"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}