Theresa Hak Kyung Cha: Multiple Offerings is the first retrospective in over two decades dedicated to the groundbreaking work of the artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (b. 1951, Busan, South Korea; d. 1982, New York City). Beginning her artistic career in the Bay Area during the early 1970s, Cha produced an expansive range of works across text-based media, video, and performance. Best known for her posthumously published book, Dictee (1982), which weaves the personal and familial into historical narratives of displacement through word and image, Cha’s interdisciplinary practice gave shape to the experimental art scenes in San Francisco, New York City, and beyond.
After emigrating from South Korea to the United States, Cha enrolled in 1969 at UC Berkeley, where she studied art practice, comparative literature, and film. Working across different mediums, Cha was keenly attuned to the active role that audiences play in the creation of meaning and prioritized nonlinear narratives to allow for more open-ended forms of interpretation—what she termed a method of “Multiple Telling with Multiple Offering.” The retrospective adopts this framework to allow for a range of entry points into Cha’s work, guiding visitors through the themes—memory, displacement, and the mutability of language, among others—that recur in her oeuvre.
Since 1992, owing to a generous gift from the Theresa Hak Kyung Cha Memorial Foundation, BAMPFA has served as the steward of Cha’s artworks and archives, making her multifaceted oeuvre accessible to researchers worldwide. Gathering over one hundred artworks and archival materials from across her short but prolific career, as well as select loans of works by Cha and other artists, Multiple Offerings highlights the inventive, playful, and meditative methods of Cha’s practice while also situating her work within a constellation of artistic forebears, peers, and contemporary artists working today for whom she has long been a lodestar.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a richly illustrated catalogue—the first museum monograph dedicated to the artist in over twenty years—featuring newly commissioned essays by Julia Bryan-Wilson, Jordan Carter, Danielle A. Jackson, Mia Kang, Mason Leaver-Yap, and the exhibition curators, as well as a roundtable discussion with artists Na Mira and Cici Wu, moderated by Min Sun Jeon.
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha: Multiple Offerings is curated by Victoria Sung, Phyllis C. Wattis Senior Curator, with Tausif Noor, Curatorial Associate.
