Conceptual artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's many 'voices' celebrated in California show

"Part of what I'm trying to do in this exhibition is to de-emphasise Dictée,"

"I wanted to honour Cha's way of making,"

"to show how she would rethink themes over and over again, in different forms, so that one idea in the early 1970s is revisited in the early 1980s."

"She was thinking through the enduring effects of dislocation through the mutability of language, history and memory, but she was doing this 50 years ago."

The Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) is mounting the first major survey of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's work in over twenty years, drawing on substantial holdings and archives. The presentation places emphasis on Cha's process and the fluidity of her practice across media rather than privileging a single canonical work. Cha repeatedly revisited themes across concrete poetry, mail art, textiles, ceramics, performance and film, reworking ideas from the early 1970s into the early 1980s. Language functioned as a central element in Cha's practice, informed by fluency in Korean, English and French and her family's migrations. Biographical details include birth in Busan in 1951, emigration to Hawaii in 1962 and the San Francisco Bay Area in 1964, multiple degrees from UC Berkeley, and U.S. citizenship in 1977.

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