That staggering loss — of a full life and career — threatens to overshadow any posthumous reception of Cha’s work. In the beautiful catalog that accompanies BAMPFA’s exhibition, Mason Leaver-Yap cautions against solely focusing on “absence” in Cha’s work. “The repeated emphasis on its ‘ghostliness’ congeals uncomfortably to a retrospective biographical lensing,” Leaver-Yap writes. Cha had no presentiment of her own death. In the mid-’70s she began a piece of text with “i have time.”
Multiple Offerings fleshes out the art historical context of Cha’s years at Berkeley with show posters, sketchbooks and the contemporaries who influenced her work. Wrapping around one corner of the first gallery, documentation of a 1975 rehearsal for Aveugle Voix (“blind voice”) shows Cha in large, warmly framed black-and-white photos, wrapping fabric around her eyes and mouth at Berkeley’s Greek Theatre. She unfurls a long white cloth with words stenciled down its center, then crouches, barefoot, head tucked into arms.
Installation view of ‘Theresa Hak Kyung Cha: Multiple Offerings’ at BAMPFA with ‘Aveugle Voix’ in the corner. (Courtesy of BAMPFA)
Much of Cha’s work was temporal — her body took up time and space in the moment of performance, then flattened into a series of still images, onto film or video footage. Save for her early ceramic vessels, very little of Cha’s work at BAMPFA extends beyond the thickness of a book. But Multiple Offerings is far from immaterial. Unfolding gracefully via sound and moving image, the show rewards a slower pace.
The formal spareness of Cha’s work, mainly rendered in a spectrum of black and white, belies its playfulness and generosity. She delighted in wordplay, printing text upside down and backwards, prying words apart into new formulations. A Ble Wail, a 1975 performance piece, is read as “a blue whale.” In Dictée, “afar” becomes “a far.”
Sometimes her art looked like a magic trick. In the 1974 performance Barren Cave Mute, she marked large sheets of white paper with invisible wax letters. As she held a candle to the paper, the wax melted to reveal the hidden message of the artwork’s title.
The 1976 film Permutations is made up of six one-second shots of Cha’s younger sister Bernadette, ordered and repeated by chance. Cha embedded herself in the film like a secret message, spliced between her sister’s images. In BAMPFA’s presentation, a suspended scrim catches the projection for a double-sided presentation.
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, ‘Faire-Part,’ 1976; Ink and press type on fifteen envelopes. (Courtesy of BAMPFA)
The exhibition moves chronologically and geographically, following Cha’s semester abroad in Paris in 1976 and her trips back to Korea in 1979 and 1980. European travel brought her into contact with Fluxus, mail art and, in Amsterdam, the conceptual artist and bookmaker Ulises Carrión. In Korea, she traveled with her brother James, shooting footage for White Dust from Mongolia, a film that remained unfinished at her death.
Scattered throughout the show are works by her antecedents and successors. A sound and textile installation by Cecila Vicuña (subject of her own stunning BAMPFA retrospective in 2018) adds vertical columns of gauzy color to the show’s restrained palette. Na Mira’s video installation Marquee, deploys some of Cha’s now-familiar tactics (reflection, text, a proxy figure) around a transistor radio tuned to the Los Angeles AM station Radio Korea.
Distance, displacement, memory, grief — Cha addressed these seemingly inexpressible things from as many angles as possible, and sometimes from every angle at once. It’s an approach, an offering, that still feels instructive, even 44 years after her death. Cha made her work with generosity, curiosity and rigor, reminding us now that no matter how difficult it is to form the words, there’s great value in trying.