Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Poetics Surveyed at Whitney and Hessel Museums – RisePEI

In photograph documentation of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Aveugle Voix (1975), the artist seems in all white, squatting, along with her black hair flowing right down to her ankles. Performing in San Francisco, Cha certain her eyes with a size of white material on which VOIX (French for voice) was stenciled in black, and wrapped round her mouth one other band marked AVEUGLE (blind). She then unfurled a scroll that reads: “phrases / fail / me,” and “aveugle / voix / sans / mot / sans / me” (blind / voice / with out / phrase / with out / me). Relying on whether or not one reads from the underside, within the order that the phrases progressively seem, or from the highest, after they’re all revealed, the strains pose a multiplicity of meanings: How is one muted by the eyes, blinded by the mouth? The work’s title, actually “blind voice,” may be a pun for “blind sees” (aveugle voit). Viewers making an attempt to unravel such paradoxes will likely be annoyed, for these ambiguities are a part of Cha’s lengthy flirtation with instability inside language, and between language and expertise. In her 1975 video Mouth to Mouth, a sea of black-and-white static slowly shifts to disclose an open mouth, stretching in variations of its O form to recommend the vowels of the Korean language, which Cha spoke fluently, together with French and English. It emits no sound, nonetheless; as an alternative, we hear speeding water and chirping birds, typically interrupted by the crackling hiss {of electrical} interference. The work suggests a preverbal inquiry into how we grow to be somatically acclimated to the “mom tongue” lengthy earlier than we are able to converse it. The discontinuous sounds, in the meantime, recommend to me a sort of delivery, each of a kid and of language itself.

Cha’s investigations into the sociopsychological mechanics and results of language are on view in two New York exhibitions this spring by summer season: a mini-retrospective titled “viewers distant relative” on the Hessel Museum of Artwork at Bard Faculty, finely orchestrated by curatorial MA graduate Min Solar Jeon, and a collection of works on this yr’s Whitney Biennial, “Quiet as It’s Stored,” curated by David Breslin and Adrienne Edwards. Aveugle Voix and Mouth to Mouth are included in each exhibits, as are the artist’s unfinished function movie, White Mud from Mongolia (1980), and her mail-art work viewers distant relative (1977). The latter piece is a home made artist’s ebook containing seven white folded sheets of paper abstractly labeled, when closed, with titles together with “object/topic,” “messenger,” and “echo.” The texts, put in in a vitrine, comprise poetic ruminations. “The messenger, is the voice-presence / occupying the area. / voice presence occupying the / time between,” Cha writes in a single. “I can solely assume that you may hear me / I can solely hope that you simply hear me,” she pleads in one other.

The eponymous exhibition at Bard opens with this work, however not like the Whitney set up, the mail works listed here are accompanied by an audio piece wherein the artist chants a breathy incantation that’s unsettlingly serene, orphic, and important: “In our relationship / I’m the item / you’re the topic…. In our relationship / you’re the object / I’m the topic.” This work units the stage for the exhibition, which charts the artist’s attentiveness to the viewers as activated by Cha’s manipulation, repetition, and discount of phrases and pictures. In a textual content accompanying “Paths,” her 1978 MFA thesis present on the College of California, Berkeley, she writes, “The artist, just like the alchemist, establishes a ‘covenant’ together with his components, in addition to with… the viewer. The artist changing into object for the viewer, the viewer as topic, the artist as topic, and viewer as object.… It’s by the presence of the ‘Different,’ any type of communication is established, accomplished.” Acutely attuned to how each verbal and nonverbal communication is engineered, Cha leaves openings for guests to hitch the marginally off-kilter echoes and rhythms of her works, and even grow to be enveloped in her logic of denaturalized, circuitous temporalities that reverberate inside and throughout her written texts and pictures, books, movies, movies, slides and projections, and performances.

The pacing of the Bard exhibition honors Cha’s use of associations, reverbs, and ripples. At occasions, voices from completely different movies echo and intersect in an intricate dance, a lot in order that it may be troublesome to hint the origin of anyone voice. A delicate, gauzy material delineates an area on the coronary heart of the exhibition, enveloping Passages Paysages (Passages Landscapes, 1978), a three-channel nonlinear video set up that includes pictures of Cha’s household images, rooms and rumpled beds, letters, and the artist’s hand. Most outstanding once more is the presence of the artist’s voice, which alternates amongst her three fluent tongues. At occasions she appears to deal with us immediately, whereas at others we appear to have stumbled into her inner ideas: “불 켜봐, 불 켜봐” (Activate the sunshine, activate the sunshine), she says. “불 꺼져, 끄지 마, 지금 꺼” (The sunshine is popping off, don’t flip it off, flip it off now). “아직 끄지 마” (Don’t flip it off but). Right here, she conveys her preoccupation with communication, in addition to impediments to transmission—what stays unsaid or unheard.

Readers of Cha’s genre-crossing autobiographical textual content Dictee (1982) will likely be aware of her formal and conceptual method of making simultaneous, parallel conversations throughout a number of addressees and audio system, such because the 9 muses of Greek mythology, Joan of Arc, Saint Thérèse, Korean revolutionary Yu Guan Quickly, and Cha’s mom Hyung Quickly Huo (a primary version of the ebook from the Bard library archives is on show). Cha was born in 1951 in Busan, South Korea, and her multilingualism was formed by her household’s 1962 immigration to america, the place she additionally realized French; her mom’s was necessitated by the 1909–45 Japanese occupation of Korea, throughout which she was compelled to stay in Manchuria, the place she was born. There, too, the Japanese had outlawed the Korean tongue, but she continued to talk it in non-public whereas doubly displaced at this historic juncture between Korea, China, and Japan. “You converse the tongue the necessary language just like the others,” Cha writes in Dictee. “It isn’t your individual. Even when it isn’t you recognize you need to. You’re Bi-lingual. You’re Tri-lingual. The tongue that’s forbidden is your individual mom tongue.… Mom tongue is your refuge. It’s being dwelling.”

Located on the factors of fracture amongst languages, Dictee particulars how displacement and colonial encounters can spur alternate articulations of selfhood, at all times contingent and relational. Likewise, in Chronology (1977), included in “viewers distant relative,” eighteen colour photocopies of Cha’s household images disrupt the standard linearity and healthful propaganda of such albums. Images of Cha’s mom, father, and siblings are repeated in violet ink and typically overlaid till they grow to be indiscernible, whereas the friction between kind and message is heightened by hand-stenciled fragments of textual content: time’s personal shadow, half ache / ake. A sister work of Chronology is included on the Biennial: quite sterilized in its presentation, the black-and-white photobook Presence Absence (1975), with its plain black cowl, is displayed in a vitrine alongside a digitized video of its pages, which function pixelated translations of the household images utilized in Chronology. Cha’s deployment of fabric deterioration and distorted transfers of her household images parallels her use of static sound in Mouth to Mouth: by the distortion of the supply, she highlights how translation can open up the likelihood for including one other layer of not solely dissonance, but additionally enrichment and enlargement. She levels a postcolonial conflict of lineages, histories, and narratives throughout language zones, divesting from the concept of the purity of the originating supply and providing as an alternative a view of how languages dynamically animate one another.

White Mud from Mongolia, on view in each exhibitions, additionally takes as its topic bodily, psychological, and linguistic displacement. Comprising gradual cinematic pictures of prepare tracks, meandering footage of Korean individuals at a market, and scenes from an airplane journey at a seemingly deserted amusement park, amongst different quotidian pictures of Korean life,  White Mud is a travelogue of types that Cha filmed along with her brother on a three-month journey to their homeland in 1980. As she writes within the unique sketches for the movie, it was supposed “as a simultaneous account of a story, starting at two separate factors in Time,” centering on a younger Korean lady residing in China and tracing the arc of her lack of reminiscence and capability for speech. Cha’s personal migration and exile, in addition to her roving mental curiosity, are refracted by her detailed shot descriptions and notes for the movie and different initiatives that she was engaged on that very same yr, all of that are on view at Bard. (Whereas engaged on White Mud, Cha edited Equipment, cinematographic equipment: Chosen writings, which was printed by Tanam Press in 1980, with essays on cinema by Roland Barthes, Dziga Vertov, Maya Deren, and Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, amongst others.) Within the yr of Cha’s go to, military basic Chun Doo-hwan mounted a brutal navy coup, declaring martial regulation and suppressing the following mass protests. These actions culminated within the Gwangju Bloodbath, wherein civilians celebrated a quick governmental retreat earlier than the rise up was crushed.

None of this turmoil is depicted within the movie, nonetheless, reflecting Cha’s characteristically allegorical and indirect strategy to contemplating the world round her, in addition to Jean-Luc Godard’s distinction between “making a political movie and making a movie politically,” the quote with which she opens the preface to Equipment. Becoming into the latter camp, White Mud exists solely in fragments, and was left unfinished after Cha’s homicide in 1982 at age thirty-one.

The relative obscurity of Cha’s work throughout her lifetime was adopted by just a few exhibition highlights within the first many years following her loss of life, together with “The Dream of the Viewers,” a retrospective of Cha’s work curated by Constance Lewallen on the Berkeley Artwork Museum and Pacific Movie Archive in 2001. In mild of the continuing, cascading societal and political collapses of the twentieth century that proceed to shadow up to date life, Cha’s prescient proposal of semantic and psychological fracture as a brand new constructive precept appears more and more to resonate with a wider viewers that features many up to date artists. On the Whitney, for example, Korean artist Na Mira’s three-channel infrared, holographic video set up interweaves histories of Korean feminism and shamanism with biography, and explicitly options imagery from Cha’s White Mud. Taking over Cha’s elliptical, declarative voice—“우린 다른 시간에 왔어” (We arrived at completely different occasions)—along with digital camera glitches and throbbingCha’s embodiment of diasporic reminiscence, which hints at one thing that’s recognized however not but expressed, begging to be launched. As Cha writes in Dictee: “It murmurs inside. It murmurs. Inside is the ache of speech the ache to say. Bigger nonetheless. Better than is the ache to not say. To not say. Says nothing in opposition to the ache to talk. It festers inside. The wound, liquid, mud. Should break. Should void.”