Theresa Hak Kyung Cha

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (차학경; March 4, 1951 – November 5, 1982) was an American novelist, producer, director, and artist of South Korean origin, best known for her 1982 novel, Dictée.

Considered an avant-garde artist, Cha was fluent in Korean, English, and French.

The main body of Cha's work is "looking for the roots of language before it is born on the tip of the tongue."

Cha's practice experiments with language through repetition, manipulation, reduction, and isolation, exploring the ways in which language marks one's identity, in unstable and multiple expressions.

Cha's interdisciplinary background was clearly evident in Dictée, which experiments with juxtaposition and hypertext of both print and visual media.

Cha's Dictée is frequently taught in contemporary literature classes including women's literature.

Cha was born in Busan, South Korea during the Korean War.

She was the middle child of five, with two older and two younger siblings, to Hyung Sang Cha (father) and Hyung Soon Cha (mother), who were both raised in Manchuria during Japan’s occupation of Korea and China, and forced to learn and work in Japanese.

Cha and her family emigrated to the United States in 1962 when Cha was twelve years old, first settling in Hawaii and then relocating in 1964 to the San Francisco Bay Area, where she attended Convent of the Sacred Heart High School.

During her time there, Cha studied French language, and French, Greek, and Roman classics.

She also sang in the choir at Sacred Heart.

By the time she graduated Cha had earned many scholastic awards, including a poetry contest prize at the age of fourteen, two years after she started learning English.

Before committing to University of California Berkeley, Cha briefly attended the University of San Francisco for a semester.

She transferred to UC Berkeley the following year, where she completed her studies in art and writing.

As an art student, she initially concentrated on ceramic sculpture.

However, she was soon introduced to the then new medium of performance, and subsequently embarked on a series of performances as protagonist, all accompanied by her live or recorded spoken words.

One of her classmates at Berkeley was artist Yong Soon Min.

As a student, she became close friends with Dennis Love, another student, and Bertrand Augst, a professor of French and comparative literature.

Her classes with Augst inspired Cha to study comparative literature, in which she later earned degrees.

Teachers and friends have stated that Cha enjoyed reading broadly, anything from Korean poetry to European modernist and postmodern literature.

During this time, the Free Speech Movement and anti-war movement of the 1970s resulted in an air of political and social upheaval for Berkeley students demanding socio-political change.

The unrest fed into the experimentation of conceptual art movements of the Bay Area.

Performance art became particularly strong in the Bay Area during Cha's schooling in the 1970s, as one of many new genres being explored by artists seeking to escape the restraints of traditional art forms, with a revolutionary spirit related to the radical political and cultural shifts taking place.

Though Cha was not an active participant in protest activities, she drew on the experimental qualities they represented, without her work itself being overtly socio-political.

She received her Bachelor's degree in comparative literature in 1973 and a second Bachelor's degree in art in 1975, both from Berkeley.

Cha worked as a student employee of the Pacific Film Archive for three years between 1974 and 1977 while earning two graduate degrees in art (MA, 1977; MFA, 1978).

As a graduate student, she became close friends with faculty member Jim Melchert, and even became his teaching assistant in 1976.

As Cha's interest in film grew, she studied at Berkeley under Bertrand Augst, who recalls her interest in poetry written by Stéphane Mallarmé and plays by Samuel Beckett.

According to Augst, Cha felt an affinity with Mallarmé's associative and restrained use of language.

Beckett's highly reductive style of theater found echoes in the spare setting of Cha's performances.

More than the stylistic influence of Beckett or Mallarmé, Cha's studies of film theory with Augst had perhaps the greatest effect on her development.

From these studies, Cha hoped to integrate film theory into her art practice.

In an application for an extension of her grant to study in Paris, Cha wrote: "It is essential for me to see the possibilities of Film-making as an expression closely tied with other expressions supported by its theory as Reference to see the application of theory to actual works followed by a re-recognition, 'realization' of the theory in practice."

In 1976, Cha decided to pursue a degree in film theory at the UC Education Abroad Program, Centre d'Etudes Americain du Cinema, in Paris.

During her stay she studied under Jean-Louis Baudry, Raymond Bellour, Monique Wittig, and Christian Metz.

Cha's MFA thesis Paths (1978) highlighted the critical role of the viewer as the receptor and activator of her work.

In it, she notes: "The viewer holds the position as the complement, an avenue, through multiple interpretations, give [sic] multiple dimensions to the work. If the work has the strength (this is very subjective) the renewal and regenerating processes could be illimitable."

Thus for Cha, the "viewer" of the work is not merely a passive subject; they are the "complement" or "avenue" that keeps the work alive with perpetual regeneration.

Her encounter with their theories culminated in her editing an anthology of writings entitled Apparatus/Cinematographic Apparatus: Selected Writings (Tanam Press, 1980), which includes articles by Roland Barthes, Jean-Louis Baudry, Theirry Kuntzel, Christian Metz, Bertrand Augst, and others as well as a piece by Cha herself, a major work based on word deconstruction titled Commentaire.

In the filmic, multipage text, Cha deconstructs the French word commentaire into French and English components and homonyms (comment, taire, commentary, tear, etc.).