If there’s one thing the late avant-garde artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha is known for, it’s almost certainly her experimental 1982 book Dictée, a hard-to-classify work that has become a mainstay of college curriculums and ambitious writers. Poet Juliana Spahr has described the work as “part autobiography, part biography, part personal diary, part ethnography, part auto-ethnography, part translation”, noting that it collages “multiple voices – American, European, and Asian – so as to build a history”.
A major new retrospective of Cha at the Berkeley Art Museum – Theresa Hak Kyung Cha: Multiple Offerings – aims to go far beyond Dictée to present the artist’s varied and prodigious output, bringing attention to her full complexity as a creative force and the many contemporary thinkers who have been inspired by her career.
