Mutual Offerings

One of the first artworks that a visitor encounters in Multiple Offerings is Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Mouth to Mouth (1975), an eight-minute video of the artist laboriously mouthing the eight Korean vowels. The image closes in tight on Cha’s mouth, the only part of her face that is captured, suffocating her as she slowly makes her way through the set of inaudible vowels. The video is enveloped by a visual and auditory static that takes the voice out of Cha’s mouth as she speaks. The longer I watch, the thicker the static seems to become, a visually porous but ultimately impenetrable wall between the performer behind the screen and the viewer in front of it. As someone who does not speak Korean, her actions are both familiar and foreign. Even if I cannot identify the sounds her mouth is forming, I share a mutual yearning to be seen, to be heard, and to be recognized.

Mouth to Mouth’s constitutive static establishes a connection between artist and audience that is unstable. Though Cha’s mouth gives shape to the fundamental sounds of her native tongue, what Cha and the viewer share is not language but the interruption of it. The mutual experience is one of alienation: the artist’s mouth reaches out and the audience, in their desire to view and hear, reaches back out but, in this case, can never quite connect. Examining the complicated relationship between artist and audience is an essential aspect of Cha’s larger oeuvre, and it was of central importance to her practice from the start. In the artist statement Cha submitted as part of her 1978 MFA thesis, she wrote: 

“The importance of audience becomes especially clear when the nature of these works deal with narrati[v]es. The audience is the subject to whom the narrative is being transmitted to.

The narrative structure attempts to be free from the more traditional linear progression. The focus is in producing Multiple Telling with Multiple Offering.”1 

In order to create possibilities for more open-ended forms of interpretation and engagement, Cha deployed nonlinear approaches to narration. Taking inspiration from Cha’s “Multiple Telling with Multiple Offering,” Multiple Offerings presents Cha’s practice as a give-and-take, situating her artworks within multiple ongoing lineages of artistic experimentation, including Bay Area conceptualism, Fluxus, and present-day interpretations of her prodigious oeuvre. 

There is perhaps no venue more appropriate for a Theresa Hak Kyung Cha retrospective than the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA). Cha was a UC Berkeley student for nearly a decade, where she obtained bachelor’s degrees in comparative literature and art in 1973 and 1975, respectively, before earning an MFA and a graduate degree in film theory. She had direct ties to BAMPFA itself; as a student, Cha worked as an art handler for the museum and as an usher at the film archive. In addition, much of the exhibition is made possible by the fact that BAMPFA has been home to Cha’s extensive archive since 1992. Notable pulls from the archive include posters from Cha’s early performances as a student, archival photographs of courses held in the museum’s galleries, and the typewritten pages of her MFA thesis. 

Retrospective exhibitions are, by nature, ambitious in scope. Multiple Offerings effectively takes on the seismic task of encompassing a career that is both surprisingly vast and greatly mythologized. Cha has become legendary in multiple artistic subfields—the realms of Asian American art, feminist art, performance art, video art, and even creative writing have leaned on Cha’s considerable contributions to art history. To say that Cha is a cult figure is an understatement. Despite this widespread recognition, Multiple Offerings is the second of only two comprehensive exhibitions of Cha’s work. The first, which was also held at BAMPFA, happened twenty-five years ago, in 2001. Titled The Dream of the Audience, the exhibition aimed to provide an overview of Cha’s career and included work on fabric, artist’s books, and mail art, but placed particular emphasis on her performance work by including extensive documentation, photographs, and audiotapes of her performances. The exhibition was called long overdue then; now, twenty-five years later, curators Victoria Sung and Tausif Noor face an even more immense pressure to put together an exhibition that captures the significance of an artist that many have called revolutionary. 

Taken literally, the title Multiple Offerings is apt. The first gallery already presents visitors with a sampling of the artist’s extensive experimentations in different media. In addition to Mouth to Mouth, a series of stills capture the progression of Cha’s 1975 performance of Aveugle Voix, in which Cha, dressed in white and blindfolded, unfurls a textile that reads from top to bottom, “GESTE AVEUGLE VOIX SANS MOT SANS ME FAIL WORDS.” This textile, white fabric with the artist’s signature block text in black, is shown alongside the images of her performance. These works surround a central display of a small selection of ceramics and weavings that Cha made as an undergraduate—Cha initially concentrated on ceramics before the radical 1970s swept the Bay Area into a conceptual frenzy, prompting her to make the switch to performance. It is the first time that these early works have been exhibited, and they are particularly fitting inclusions in this exhibition, serving to emphasize both the diversity of her practice and the influence of her Berkeley education. The latter is further emphasized around the corner, where works made by Cha’s most influential instructors, including Bay Area figures such as Terry Fox and Jim Melchert, are placed alongside her own, giving the viewer a chance to draw a direct line from teacher to student.

Though Cha championed the nonlinear, the exhibition continues to move through her oeuvre in a mostly linear fashion, chronologically and geographically. After covering her undergraduate years, the exhibition transitions to foreground the text-based works that Cha created as a graduate student, both at Berkeley and during her semester abroad in Paris. The archives shine in this section, which revolves around a number of her more ephemeral works and her experiments with conceptual art and the playful “do-it-yourself” attitude of Fluxus. A vitrine with Cha’s artist books illustrates her engagement with wordplay and once again emphasizes her broad range of materiality. The books, hand-bound collections of typewriter ink on canvas and graphite on handmade paper, act as a primer for Cha’s mail art, which takes center stage in the section that centers Cha’s works made in Paris. An innovative display of Faire-Part (1976), a suite of fifteen envelopes with press type and thick, black inked borders are displayed in a grid formation with each envelope mounted perpendicular to the gallery wall. From an oblique angle, the envelopes shift in shape, allowing each row to blend and overlap. In an adjacent display, Audience Distant Relative (1977–78) spotlights the envelope again, this time featuring a set of six envelopes mailed to the Galerie Lóa. The envelopes, which originally each contained a letter with poetic text, are themselves adorned with phrases such as the work’s title, “audience distant relative,” and others, including “object/subject” and “between delivery,” making up their own separate but related poetic text. Cha envisioned the audience opening the envelopes and holding the letters while reading them, an act accompanied by an audio recording of her voice reading the letters aloud. All of the work’s elements are present in Multiple Offerings, but the participatory experience is not; the letters are now displayed alongside the envelopes rather than inside, the interactive experience that Cha conceptualized stymied by the glass separating viewer from object. Even without the hands-on component, however, Cha’s emphasis on the envelope as both the vehicle for and a medium of mail art serves to remind the viewer of the possibilities of exchange in the relationship between artist and audience. 

A distinct shift occurs in the next section of the exhibition, which turns its attention to Cha’s video works. This section is anchored by two critical films, made in 1979 and 1980, after the artist’s two return trips to Korea with her brother, James. The first of these is Cha’s White Dust from Mongolia (1980). Begun in 1979 but never completed, White Dust’s protagonist is a Korean woman who has suffered a tripartite loss. She loses her homeland before the film begins—the film takes place in China, where she sought asylum during the Japanese occupation of Korea. After an unspecified event, she also loses her memory and her capacity for speech. White Dust follows her journey as she re-learns her past and learns a new language, investigating the malleability of identity and the psychological consequences of displacement. The second is Exilée (1980), a meditation on Cha’s travels from California to Korea. It is an ambitious installation, consisting of two films, one projected onto the wall and the other shown on a monitor embedded within that wall, while Cha’s voice fills the room, speaking phrases in both French and English. Both works are indispensable components of Cha’s oeuvre, tackling core themes—the experience of displacement, feelings of loss that come from dislocation, and the limitations of language—in their respective explorations of physical distance and temporal disjunction. 

This section of video works is a continuation of the exhibition’s chronologically guided narrative arc and remains grounded in geography (Cha’s visits to Korea). Yet it is also the section of the exhibition that does the most to trouble this linearity. Though the exhibition includes works by other artists, such as Cha’s teachers, to enrich the historical context of Cha’s work, this part of Multiple Offerings puts Cha’s video works in direct conversation with a community of artists across space and time. The dialogue begins between White Dust and the LA–based, Korean American artist Na Mira’s Marquee (2023), a multimedia installation that employs mirrors, a transistor radio, images of text, and videos of the artist herself, flooded in red light. Staged diagonally from each other, these two works engage in a conversation about linguistic rupture and belonging that takes place across the four decades between their dates of manufacture. The conversation continues in the next gallery, where rows of CRT televisions on pedestals line a corridor-esque gallery space. Some of these show Cha’s video works from the 1970s, while others show more recent works made by other artists, including L. Franklin Gilliam’s Now Pretend (1992), which the accompanying wall label identifies as explicitly referencing Cha’s 1975 performance of Aveugle Voix, as well as Strangers to Ourselves (2004) by Cha’s friend and classmate Yong Soon Min. 

In my experience, retrospectives often attend to the impact of an artist’s career separately from their actual artworks. I think of, for example, the 2022 retrospective of Filipino American artist Carlos Villa, which acknowledged his lasting impact by dedicating a separate gallery at the end of the exhibition to the works of artists who took inspiration from him.2 This approach presented Villa as playing a paternalistic role, emphasizing his legacy as a teacher and mentor over that as a peer. Multiple Offerings, on the other hand, integrates Cha’s legacy in immediate proximity to her material output. There is a horizontality to the manner in which the exhibition presents the lasting impact of Cha’s work across generations. Each CRT television is displayed identically, suggesting that each is a self-sustaining unit in a multi-generational and multi-sited discussion, an evolving exchange of ideas between these works and their artists. By incorporating artworks that were inspired by Cha’s oeuvre directly into the flow of its narrative, the section of video works is particularly successful in showcasing her role in ongoing conversations in contemporary art history.

There are instances where this strategy is less effective, leaving an artist’s work feeling out of place. Cecilia Vicuña’s Quipu Girok (2021), a title which marries Andean and Korean and roughly translates to “knot record,” appears centrally in the transition zone between Cha’s Berkeley and Paris eras. Recalling the weaving on display that Cha made during her time as an undergraduate, long lengths of dyed textiles hang from bamboo sticks mounted on the ceiling; these fabrics, which include gauze, silk polyester, and cotton, are painted with pigment and pastel crayon, creating a large installation that exists at the intersection of drawing, textile, and sculpture. Quipu Girok’s colorfully dyed textiles are a departure from Cha’s relatively bare aesthetic, and its placement in the middle of the pathway between two eras of Cha’s career disrupts the flow of the straightforward arc that the exhibition aims to portray, even though the material and conceptual links that place the work in conversation with Cha’s are clear.

The exhibition closes with the works Cha made after her move to New York. A certain amount of tragedy is inescapable when talking about the last years of her life—Cha only spent a few years in New York before she was murdered in 1982, at only 31. At the time, she was actively establishing a promising career, working as an assistant at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, teaching video art at Elizabeth Seton College, taking on a role as editor at Tanam Press, and preparing work for an upcoming exhibition at Artists Space. Her groundbreaking novel, Dictee, had just been published a few weeks prior. Dictee makes an appearance in this section of the exhibition in a display case that contains the first edition of the book, a selection of pages from the original manuscript, and some of the source materials reproduced in it. For some visitors, this might be a painful reminder of her untimely death. However, Sung and Noor take great care to present Dictee without invoking sorrow, instead focusing on its lasting impact on artists, writers, poets, and filmmakers. 

It is tempting to say that Cha haunts Multiple Offerings. Cha is omnipresent as her voice emanates from the displays of her video work or from her multimedia installations. Her physical presence is apparent as well—many of her performances are displayed in the form of photo documentation laid out like a storyboard, mapping her movements as she flashes in and out of each photograph. Paired with the stark color palette of her work, which largely consists of black-and-white film and the high-contrast combination of black text on white ground, it is easy to read a ghostly quality into Cha’s presence in the exhibition. I hesitate, however, to pursue this line of thinking. Throughout the exhibition, Sung and Noor de-center the end of Cha’s life in favor of foregrounding the ongoing collaboration between artist and audience and between artist and artist, two forms of collective effort that transcend time and space. Multiple Offerings is reverential, not melancholic. It is far more apt to characterize Cha not as a specter but as an ancestor. She is not a ghost trapped in the past. Four decades after her passing, Cha is still a pioneer in an artistic community that thrives from a foundation she built. In direct conversation with her teachers, classmates, and those whose careers are profoundly indebted to hers throughout the galleries, this exhibition argues that Cha’s work is not bound by time; always rooted in both the past and the future, Cha’s work is alive, an indispensable part of a generation of new creations. 

This last point is emphasized in the endcap of Multiple Offerings. Cici Wu’s Upon Leaving the White Dust (2017–18) occupies its own small gallery space across from the main exhibition’s exit, and, as its title suggests, Cha’s White Dust is the basis for Wu’s work. Wu captured the light data from Cha’s film and converted it into digital video of a flickering white light emitted by a floor-based projector. That light is projected upon a field of small hand-made sculptural objects that reference Cha’s storyboard for the original film. Borrowing the austere palette of Cha’s oeuvre, Wu’s installation recalls her use of stark black on white ground as each handmade sculpture casts shadows against the wall, illuminated by the quivering white light of the projector. White Dust will remain perpetually unfinished, but each of Wu’s handmade objects is a tiny monument to Cha’s ambitious work, the light a reminder that Cha’s work lives on. 

Upon reflection, I am pulled back to Cha’s MFA thesis and her prescient description of the alliance between artist, artwork, and audience. The strength of her vision comes across in the very first sentences, which reads, “The viewer holds the position as the complement, an avenue, through multiple interpretations, gives multiple dimensions to the work. If the work has the strength (and this is subjective) the renewal and regenerating processes could be illimitable.”3 Multiple Offerings proves her right.

1 Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, “Paths,” (MFA thesis, University of California, Berkeley, 1978).

2 Carlos Villa, a San Francisco-based Filipino American artist, created an impressive body of multimedia painting and sculpture. Even more impressive, however, is his influence on multiple generations of artists. From teaching one the San Francisco Art Institute’s first multicultural art courses to organizing symposia that discussed the issues faced by minority artists, Villa’s practice was as much about creating objects as it was about creating community. A 2022 multi-venue retrospective of his works was held between San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum and the San Francisco Art Commission. A separate gallery of the Asian Art Museum’s part of the exhibition housed the works of his students, including Paul Pfeiffer and the collective Mail Order Brides (M.O.B.).

3 Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, “Paths.”

Sarah Tsung is a PhD candidate at the University of Michigan specializing in modern and contemporary Asian American art. She is currently a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley and is based in the Bay Area.

Image of Aveugle Voix: Photograph by Trip Callaghan. Gift of the Theresa Hak Kyung Cha Memorial Foundation.

Image of Faire-Part: Photograph by Benjamin Blackwell. Gift of the Theresa Hak Kyung Cha Memorial Foundation.

Still of White Dust from Mongolia: Gift of the Theresa Hak Kyung Cha Memorial Foundation.

Still of Exilée: Gift of the Theresa Hak Kyung Cha Memorial Foundation.