In 1976 she studied at the Centre d'Etudes Americaine du Cinema in Paris. Over a ten-year period in the 1970s, she received four degrees from the University of California at Berkeley: a B.A. Theresa Hak Kyung Cha was born in 1951 in Pusan, South Korea and died in New York City in 1982. As an editor and writer at Tanam Press, she produced two well-known works, Dictée (1982) and Apparatus, an important anthology of essays on the cinematic apparatus. After years in the Bay Area and time in Europe, Cha moved to New York City in 1980. Uprooted during the Korean War, her family immigrated to America in 1962, moving first to Hawaii and then to San Francisco. Drawing on sources and strategies as diverse as concrete poetry, Korean cultural traditions and conceptual art, Cha speaks with a distinctive voice.Ĭha's exploration of exile and dislocation in her art is informed by her own history. Themes of displacement and rupture are articulated in forms derived from French psychoanalytic cinema and linguistic theory of the 1970s Cha studied in France with Christian Metz, Raymond Bellour and Thierry Kuntzel, among others. Much of Cha's work balances a rigorous analytical approach with an almost spiritual evocation of transformation and suffering. In her highly theoretical yet poetic video works, Cha uses performance, speech and text to explore interactions of language, meaning and memory. Her collage-like book Dictée, which was published posthumously in 1982, is recognized as an influential investigation of identity in the context of history, ethnicity and gender. Although grounded in French psychoanalytic film theory, her art is also informed by far-ranging cultural and symbolic references, from shamanism to Confucianism and Catholicism. Her works included artists' books, mail art, performance, audio, video, film, and installation. From the mid-1970s until her death at age 31 in 1982, Korean-born artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha created a rich body of conceptual art that explored displacement and loss.

Dictee by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha