Awakenings.

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INDICES

[1] Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, still from "Exilee," 1980.

[21 Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, still from "Exilee," 1980

[3] Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, "Surplus Novel," 1980.

* The Dream of the Audience

* Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (1951-1982)

* Berkeley Art Museum, University of California, Berkeley September 12 - December 16, 2001

University Art Gallery and Beall Center for Art and Technology, University of California, Irvine January 15 - March 3, 2002

Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York April 4 - June 16, 2002

Krannert Art Museum and Kinkead Pavilion, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign August 30 - November 3, 2002

Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, Seattle December 6, 2002 - March 2, 2003

SSamzie Space, Seoul, Korea May 6 - June 29, 2003

Constance M. Lewallen, The Dream of the Audience: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (1951 -1982) (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001)

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Dictee (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001)

* ERIN GARCIA works as a curatorial associate in the Photography

* Department of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. She

* recently completed her M.A. degree in Art History at the

* University of New Mexico in Albuquerque.

Berkeley Art Museum's "The Dream of the Audience" presents a comprehensive selection of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's oeuvre. The body of work on display is impressive, particularly in light of the artist's premature death at the age of 31. Though still early in her career, Cha was fairly prolific and experimented with a diverse range of media. Works on paper, videos, artist's books, mail art pieces and documentation of performances are all on view in the exhibition. Despite this broad array of media "The Dream of the Audience" is remarkably unified, underscoring Cha's intensely consistent vision.

A native of Korea, Cha immigrated to San Francisco with her family in 1964. She attended the University of California, Berkeley, earning several degrees including a B.A. in comparative literature and an M.F.A. in studio art. As a student, she worked as an usher for the Berkeley Art Museum's Pacific Film Archive and maintained close ties to the Bay Area's experimental art scene. Her interest in film took her abroad to study at the Centre d'Etudes American du Cinema in Paris, where she also edited an anthology of writings by of some of her teachers. Cha spent the last years of her life in New York City where she was murdered in a random act of violence. Shortly before her death Cha published what is perhaps her best-known work, an artist's book entitled Dictee, recently reissued by The University of California Press.

Cha's academic experiences factored heavily in her work--film theory, semiotics, structuralism, psychoanalysis, feminism and literature all make appearances. Though Cha took an intellectual approach to art making, theory was not an end in itself. Instead, she used theoretical discourse to circle in and out of a set of interrelated ideas, always finding at the center something personal and specific to tell, Her experiences as an immigrant, of learning to communicate in a foreign tongue and of living between two cultures, were some of her most pervasive meditations.

These experiences manifested themselves in Cha's preoccupation with language and linguistic structures. Almost all of her work deals with language in some way. The exhibition opens with a piece entitled "Morcels" (1976), which presents a poem about burying soybeans in the snow. The poem begins along the right edge of a rice paper sheet next to a vertical strip of black and white photographs picturing Cha obscuring her face with her hands. The words run from top to bottom in the style of Eastern script, changing directions in later stanzas as they move across the page from right to left. Some lines run in the traditional horizontal of western writing, while others appear upside-down, backward and sideways, Merging typography with calligraphy, the press-type letters form a pattern on the page that gently confounds an easy read. "Morcels" asks viewers to consider the crossed connections that occur when one language learns another; as such, the piece provides a good introduction to the rest of the exhibition.

For Cha, language served as both subject matter and a framework for experimentation across mediums. In "Pause Still" (1979), a piece she performed with her sister Bernadette at San Francisco's alternative art space Bo Langton Street (now known as New Langton Arts on Folsom Street), Cha explored the syntactical codes common to various forms of communication. The performance incorporated slides, live action and audio of Cha speaking disjunctive phrases over tracks of a Korean singer and the sound of rushing water. Represented in the exhibition by photographic documentation and an audiotape, the performance is difficult to envision. An artist's statement helps fill in the inevitable gaps: "In theater, dance, and performance one convention that is used repeatedly is a fade, with a closing of an act or sequence...etc., which has similar functions as a dissolve in film, as demarcation, punctuation, a series of syntax." Focusing on the pause or the moment in-between, Cha attempted to make visible and audible what is normally imperceptible--the point of transition where one word becomes another and where identity shifts with the passage of time.

There is an elusive quality to Cha's work Ambiguous details permeate the many layers of meaning, thwarting attempts to know the work fully. Perhaps the most enigmatic piece in the exhibition is Cha's 50-minute film and video installation "Exilee" (1980). The title of the work, French for exiled, appears in black block letters on a video monitor. In subsequent screens the word is broken into its constituent parts, in some cases revealing related ideas in fragments like "exile" and "ile," the French word for island. These words resonate as Cha's voice counts down the hours it takes to fly from California to Korea, while still images reminiscent of a journey to a faraway land--airplane seats, clouds and a ceramic bowl--dissolve into one another like fading memories.

The Berkeley Art Museum displayed "Exilee" in special theater screenings, apparently as Cha designed it, with the video monitor mounted in the center of a white wall serving as a screen for a Super-8 film. The film image shifts between two scenes: light from a window slowly moving across a blank wall and a breeze blowing through a curtained window. Stranded inside these rooms, watching time slowly pass, feelings of loneliness, alienation and immobility set in. There is an evocative, poetic component to "Exilee" as well as a theoretical one. The steady internal glow emanating from the video screen contrasts the flickering light of the film projection, foregrounding the structure of the filmic apparatus itself, The idea of two modes of viewing the world superimposed atop one another offers a potent metaphor for Cha's reflections on what it means to be a part of two cultures.

The dislocating effects of time and distance are recurring themes in Cha's work. A mail art piece entitled "Audience Distant Relative" (1977). explores the temporal divide between a word spoken and an idea received. The piece consists of a series of envelopes and cards imprinted with lines of text: "This is a letter read aloud/upon opening it/you hear the sender's voice as your eyes move/over the words/you, the receiver, seeing the sender's image/speak over the/voice On an accompanying audiotape Cha delivers the lines in a slightly different order than they appear on the cards so that the words reach your ears at different points than they reach your eyes. As with "Exllee" and almost all of Cha's work, emotional experience is interpreted through intellectual analysis. The piece is as much a contemplation of the relationship between artist and audience as it is about communicating across gaps--both cultural and physical.

Cha tended to treat her personal experiences with a high degree of gravity, and, consequently, much of her work is marked by a melancholic tone. Two mixed-media pieces entitled "Surplus Novel" (1980) reveal a more playful side to the artist, Inside small ceramic bowls, Cha placed short, typewritten lines on tiny strips of paper joined by thread. Strung together, or sung together, these fragments of text form the lyrics to a song, reminiscent of the Beatles, about Yoko Ono. The song describes an experience Cha had while walking down the street and being mistaken for the Japanese artist. Made as personal gifts to her sister and brother, who lent the pieces to the exhibition, Cha lightheartedly referenced a sense of the cultural alienation her siblings must have shared. The contents of these modest bowls speak of the fragmentation of self, of human frailty and, at the same time, of hopeful resilience.

Though intensely complex and deep with meaning, Cha's work is notably spare and economical in presentation. A pared down, Asian aesthetic reigns throughout the exhibition-- itself, in its lack of embellishment, becoming a kind of motif. Cha's black hair contrasts white draperies in her performance stills. Black and white images of unadorned rooms and white-curtained windows recur in videos and film. There is elegance to the restraint and austerity of the imagery that extends to, or perhaps finds inspiration in, the clean utility of the printed page. Throughout "The Dream of the Audience," letterpressed, typewritten and stenciled-on words adorn plain white or off-white sheets of paper and fabric.

Nowhere is this minimal aesthetic more evident than in an untitled work lent by the late artist's husband, photographer Richard Barnes. A thin red thread strung across a blank page charts a crooked course from one side to the other, making one small loop along the way. A great deal might be read into this modest piece. Could it represent the compelling yet troubled linearity of film or language? Could it picture a thought unencumbered by language--a dream, perhaps? In the context of the exhibition, surrounded by so many words, the piece seems an eloquently wordless expression.