My video and performance work are explorations of language structures inherent in written and spoken material, photographic and filmic images —the creation of new relationships and meanings in the simultaneity of these forms. – Theresa Hak Kyung Cha

Artists Space presents Theresa Hak Kyung Cha: Multiple Offerings , the first retrospective in twenty-five years dedicated to the groundbreaking work of the artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. Cha produced an expansive range of works across text-based media, video, and performance, including her genre-defying book, Dictée (1982). The artist’s interdisciplinary practice contributed to experimental art scenes in New York City, San Francisco, Paris, and beyond.

After emigrating from South Korea to the United States, Cha enrolled at UC Berkeley in 1969, where she studied art practice, comparative literature, and film. Keenly attuned to the active role that audiences play in the creation of meaning, she prioritized nonlinear narratives to allow for more open-ended forms of interpretation—what she termed a method of “Multiple Telling with Multiple Offering.” This retrospective adopts her framework to allow for a range of entry points into the work, guiding visitors through the themes—memory, displacement, and the mutability of language, among others—that recur in Cha’s oeuvre.

Cha moved to New York City in 1980, where she supported herself with several jobs while pursuing her artistic career. She worked as an administrative assistant in the European Sculpture and Decorative Arts Department at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, taught video art at Elizabeth Seton College in Yonkers, and served as an editor at Tanam Press, a publishing imprint dedicated to artists’ books that was founded by her friend and collaborator Reese Williams.

On November 5, 1982, Cha’s short but prolific career came to an end when she was murdered just weeks before her planned exhibition at Artists Space. At the time of her death, Cha was producing a new photographic series inspired by her time working at the Met. Multiple Offerings presents that unfinished series of black-and-white prints alongside nearly one hundred artworks and archival materials from across her career, highlighting the inventive, playful, and meditative methods of Cha’s practice.

About the artist

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (b. 1951, Busan, South Korea; d. 1982, New York City) emigrated to the United States in 1962, settling first in Hawaii and then moving to San Francisco in 1964. The Bay Area remained Cha's home for most of her life. She attended the University of California, Berkeley, where she received four undergraduate and graduate degrees in comparative literature and art. In 1980, Cha moved to New York City, where she worked as an editor and writer for Tanam Press, producing two important works: Dictée, a book-form collage of poetry, found text, and images; and Apparatus, an anthology of writings on the film apparatus. In 1982, Cha was awarded an artist's residence at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and was preparing for an upcoming exhibition at Artists Space, New York City. Cha’s work has been included in recent exhibitions both nationally and internationally, including 12th Seoul Mediacity Biennale: This Too, Is a Map (2023), Seoul Museum of Art; Whitney Biennial 2022: Quiet as It's Kept, Whitney Museum, New York City; and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha: Audience Distant Relative, Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York (2022). In 1990, BAMPFA organized the artist’s first solo exhibition as part of its MATRIX series of contemporary art, followed by her first retrospective in 2001 (Theresa Hak Kyung Cha: Dream of the Audience). The exhibition traveled to seven venues, including University of California, Irvine; Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York; Krannert Art Museum at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Henry Art Gallery at University of Washington, Seattle; Ssamzie Space, Seoul; Generali Foundation, Vienna; and Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona. In 1992, Cha’s family donated the entirety of her artworks and archives to BAMPFA, where they form the cornerstone of the museum’s Conceptual Art Study Center and continue to be accessible to researchers today.