A Landmark Retrospective Reveals Artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Many Voices

The Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive’s retrospective “Theresa Hak Kyung Cha: A Diverse Work” (on view through April 19, then at Artists Space in New York from September 11 to November 21) transforms the towering gallery into a living archive—one that breathes, shimmers, and speaks in multiple languages.

The largest exhibition ever of a Korean-American avant-garde artist and writer, and her first retrospective in more than two decades, this ambitious exhibition brings together more than a hundred works and archival material, many on view for the first time, spanning performance, film, writing, mail art, and even ceramics created during her student years.

For many people, Cha’s name is synonymous with a work: dictionaryPublished in 1982, this genre-defying work moves between memoir, history, translation, and myth, and has become a widely circulated and influential cult classic in avant-garde, feminist, and Asian American literary circles. But this exhibition shows dictionary This is just one point in a deeply interdisciplinary practice involving language, exile, and the fragile mechanisms of memory.

Images may contain faces, heads, people photography, portraits, adult clothing, gloves, body parts, fingers and hands

Born in Busan, South Korea, in 1951 and raised in the Bay Area after immigrating in 1964, Cha studied at the University of California, Berkeley for nearly a decade, eventually earning four degrees while absorbing the conceptual and performance-driven art scene of the 1970s. The retrospective returns to these origins, starting with student experiments—ceramics, fiber works, and early films—that reveal the artist already exploring the disconnect between speech and meaning.

In one video, Cha speaks Korean vowels directly into the camera, making the sounds invisible to the audience. Photographs document early performance pieces staged on campus—the act of burning long strips of paper, unfolding text, or performing a Aviger VoixStrolling around in white garments emblazoned with letters, the fabric untied over the face, as if language itself was a veil. The title literally translates from French as “The Blind Man’s Voice,” but it also sounds like “The Blind Man Can Speak.”

“She was always interested in these glitches between languages, in puns and puns, in the disconnect between what is written and what is heard,” noted curator Tausif Noor. Cha grew up speaking Korean, English and French. “An interest in the possibilities of expression and the limitations of language runs throughout her work.”