![\"gallery](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/Install_Multiple-Offerings_2026_002_hpr_2000.jpg\")
Installation view of \u2018Theresa Hak Kyung Cha: Multiple Offerings\u2019 at BAMPFA with \u2018Aveugle Voix\u2019 in the corner. (Courtesy of BAMPFA)<\/p>\nThat staggering loss \u2014 of a full life and career \u2014 threatens to overshadow any posthumous reception of Cha\u2019s work. In the beautiful catalog that accompanies BAMPFA\u2019s exhibition, Mason Leaver-Yap cautions against solely focusing on \u201cabsence\u201d in Cha\u2019s work. \u201cThe repeated emphasis on its \u2018ghostliness\u2019 congeals uncomfortably to a retrospective biographical lensing,\u201d Leaver-Yap writes. Cha had no presentiment of her own death. In the mid-\u201970s she began a piece of text with \u201ci have time.\u201d<\/p>\n
Multiple Offerings fleshes out the art historical context of Cha\u2019s 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 (\u201cblind voice\u201d) shows Cha in large, warmly framed black-and-white photos, wrapping fabric around her eyes and mouth at Berkeley\u2019s Greek Theatre. She unfurls a long white cloth with words stenciled down its center, then crouches, barefoot, head tucked into arms.<\/p>\n
Installation view of \u2018Theresa Hak Kyung Cha: Multiple Offerings\u2019 at BAMPFA with \u2018Aveugle Voix\u2019 in the corner. (Courtesy of BAMPFA)<\/p>\n
Much of Cha\u2019s work was temporal \u2014 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
The formal spareness of Cha\u2019s 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 \u201ca blue whale.\u201d In Dict\u00e9e, \u201cafar\u201d becomes \u201ca far.\u201d<\/p>\n
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\u2019s title.<\/p>\n
The 1976 film Permutations is made up of six one-second shots of Cha\u2019s younger sister Bernadette, ordered and repeated by chance. Cha embedded herself in the film like a secret message, spliced between her sister\u2019s images. In BAMPFA\u2019s presentation, a suspended scrim catches the projection for a double-sided presentation.<\/p>\n
![\"thick](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/Install_Multiple-Offerings_2026_130_hpr_2000.jpg\")
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, \u2018Faire-Part,\u2019 1976; Ink and press type on fifteen envelopes. (Courtesy of BAMPFA)<\/p>\n
The exhibition moves chronologically and geographically, following Cha\u2019s 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 Carri\u00f3n. In Korea, she traveled with her brother James, shooting footage for White Dust from Mongolia, a film that remained unfinished at her death.<\/p>\n
Scattered throughout the show are works by her antecedents and successors. A sound and textile installation by Cecila Vicu\u00f1a (subject of her own stunning BAMPFA retrospective<\/a> in 2018) adds vertical columns of gauzy color to the show\u2019s restrained palette. Na Mira<\/a>\u2019s video installation Marquee, deploys some of Cha\u2019s now-familiar tactics (reflection, text, a proxy figure) around a transistor radio tuned to the Los Angeles AM station Radio Korea.<\/p>\n Distance, displacement, memory, grief \u2014 Cha addressed these seemingly inexpressible things from as many angles as possible, and sometimes from every angle at once. It\u2019s 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\u2019s great value in trying.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"That staggering loss \u2014 of a full life and career \u2014 threatens to overshadow any posthumous reception of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":165963,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[143,145,144],"class_list":{"0":"post-165962","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-oakland","8":"tag-oakland","9":"tag-oakland-headlines","10":"tag-oakland-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/165962","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=165962"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/165962\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/165963"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=165962"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=165962"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=165962"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}