This essay appears in Another Gaze 05 which you can preorder here.
A rare image of the Korean-American artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha at work appears in an out-of-print memorial book, published by her family and friends in November 1983, one year after the 31-year-old artist was raped and murdered by serial offender Joseph Sanza.1 Cha sits at a small table in a cramped studio, bent over spools of videotape wound on an editing machine. The two monitors at her back faintly display images from her 1978 video installation ‘Passages Paysages’. A razorblade in her right hand, Cha is poised to manually edit the tape by splicing it together. Beneath the image are the words étudiante en cinéma – student of cinema.
In the wake of her murder, Cha’s experimental novel Dictee (1982), now widely considered her masterpiece, quickly went out of circulation. Although the text gained renewed critical attention in the nineties, Cha’s moving image work remains less known, perhaps because much of it exists solely in fragments, in sketches of work left unfinished and in photographs of performances and installation projects.2,3 Her only feature-length film, White Dust From Mongolia, is unrealised, its production interrupted by her premature death, yet it provides a path towards understanding Cha’s cinematic vision, which sought to mobilise cinema as a catalyst for both new ways of relating to audiences and collective historical reckoning. Meanwhile, the fragments of Cha’s extant work help illuminate White Dust’s ambitions and how cinema fit into her artistic and political project. Cinema offered Cha another way of working and thinking, and she, in turn, re-envisioned what it could be.
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White Dust From Mongolia
In May 1980, Cha travelled from New York to Seoul with her younger brother, James, to begin work on White Dust. The proposed film centres on an unnamed female amnesiac and her process of coming into memory, intended as a multiple allegory for Korean history, “physical and psychological” displacement, and the processes of language acquisition, memory, and identity formation.4 “She is without a past,” Cha writes,
her past is speculative, fictitious, or imagined. The narrative alludes to abandonment, war, orphanage, her absolute anonymity—encompassing her disappearance, her abandonment, and finally her lack of memory, and lack of speech (amnesia, verbal amnesia). Her anonymity gives the character a possibility of multiple identities, she becomes ‘collective’ a metaphor for any possible identities:
–young girl at the cinema
–maid crouching on the ground, her back turne
–marketplace
–orphan
–nation, a historical condition, Mother, Memory5
A later project proposal clarifies that the narrative unfolds during the time Korea remained under Japanese imperial rule (1909-1945), and is primarily set in China, where many Koreans, including Cha’s mother, received asylum from the Japanese occupation. The theme of verbal amnesia experienced by White Dust’s protagonist gestures toward this history of double displacement, exile from both the Korean homeland and language, whose usage was banned under Japanese rule.6 Cha was forced to abandon her filming in South Korea in the wake of violent political unrest. After President Park Chung-hee was assassinated in October 1979, General Chun Doo-hwan seized ruling power and, in addition, appointed himself as new head of the Korean secret police (KCIA). Mass demonstrations erupted throughout the country in May 1980, and Chun responded with force, declaring martial law, shutting down universities, dissolving the legislature and banning all political activity. Thousands of citizens were arrested, and countless more were massacred by the National Guard, who brutally suppressed the popular rebellion in Kwangju (May 18-27, 1980). According to Cha’s sister, Bernadette, Theresa and James were harassed by police officers who were suspicious of their cameras.
White Dust exists only in fragments of scripts, storyboards and unedited location footage, but its themes and formal structure represent a maturation of interests that Cha had long explored in her artistic practice, namely time, language, memory, and loss. Cha’s work resolutely defied the fixed boundaries of any single discipline, moving fluidly between writing, sculpture, film, video, multimedia installation, and performance art, but time was a dominant preoccupation. Like many artists, she worked in the brief pockets of time she was able to steal for herself within the day’s quotidian flows. In a letter to her older brother, John, shortly after finishing the manuscript of Dictee, she writes, “I am always surprised when I see a completed work of something that I have done, all done piece by piece, and between jobs and breaks, in sleep, between arguments with Richard [Barnes; her husband], all the maniac frustrations of these jobs, joblessness, poverty states.”7 As Elvan Zabunyan notes, the seeming urgency of Cha’s artistic production is “paradoxically accompanied by a very slow temporality, as if she were determined to impart her own time, her own duration, to her works.”8 The rhythm of her work sets itself apart from the relentless drive of the working world that she laments in her letter, deploying repetitions, ellipses, slowness, and asynchrony of image and word to invert the “more traditional linear progression” of narration.9 Her early video works are structural investigations of cinema as well as durational experiments, stretching the contours of a given gesture to open up new meanings. Cha’s first film, ‘Secret Spill’ (1974), documents a performance in which she slowly unzips two large cloth bags, revealing and then spilling masses of earth. The 27-minute video renders time palpable, the handheld camera gradually panning over the surface of the bags, restricting what is visible and following Cha’s gentle caresses of the cloth in a sensual accentuation of touch and sound. ‘Mouth to Mouth’ (1975) is similarly an exercise in deferral. Cha once described the aim of her work as “looking for the roots of the language before it is born on the tip of the tongue”,10 and ‘Mouth to Mouth’ seems to inhabit this moment of suspension, “before [language] is born”. Superimposing video static and the sounds of running water over close-ups of a mouth silently repeating Korean graphemes, the film disrupts speech to foreground the duration of each movement and the embodied “roots” of language.
These early works established Cha’s interest in temporal disjuncture as a formal device. She later began to utilise the formal language of displacement to new ends: an exploration of her own past through meditations on memory and exile. Her multichannel video installation ‘Passages Paysages’ choreographs three different Super 8 videos on separate monitors, each composed of “dissolves and fades of still images and narration” set at a slight delay from one another. Playing on the resonances between the French words pays (country/homeland), paysages (landscapes), and passages (as both metaphorical and physical journeys), her images of family photographs, empty rooms and bundles of letters migrate across the monitors, their asynchronous loops emphasising the temporal experience of displacement. The dissolves and fades, which render the images on screen ephemeral and barely visible, mirror the difficulty of “trying to remember” the distant past and “almost having to fabricate it.”11 In her scenario, Cha writes, “the point of view is from a delayed time and space, either in the past or the future, there is a sense of lost time and space, and the desire to retrieve it, to know again.”12
‘Passages Paysages’ (1978)
This desire to retrieve a “lost time and space” was bound to the Cha family’s experiences of exile and alienation as Korean immigrants. Born in Busan in 1951, during the Korean War, Cha came of age in its devastating aftermath: the division of Korea into North and South and the permanent separation of families across the newly militarised border. When her family left for the United States in 1963, South Korea was under martial law, during which Park’s militant secret police routinely carried out mass arrests of politicians, civil servants, student organisers and political dissidents under sweeping anticommunist laws. Her family resettled in the Bay Area, and Cha embarked upon a nine-year academic career at the University of California, Berkeley, where she earned four degrees in Art and Comparative Literature.13 Berkeley’s campus was a centre for radical political organising; as in South Korea, police regularly responded with tear gas and brute force. Cha’s work did not directly address the political struggles of the era, but nevertheless strove to imagine a mode of being in the world that was not irreducibly structured by violence, “a salvation from the struggle of being human.”14 Although her work drew on her own experiences, she sought to transcend the bounds of her individuality by partially obscuring or removing herself from view. In her performances, her body is often seen at a distance or in silhouette behind diaphanous screens, while in her video work, she shows only her hands, her mouth, or her face flickering in a single frame. This abstraction, she thought, would lend her work a radical openness, which would in turn engender new relationships between audience and artist. Her 1978 MFA thesis ‘Paths’ is framed in terms of alchemical transformation, explaining that through art, “the perception of an audience has the possibility of being altered, of being presented a constant change, Re volution.”15
Cha’s study of cinema was instrumental to her understanding of the politics of altering “material” and “perception”.16 Among her aesthetic influences were Jean-Luc Godard, Chris Marker, Marguerite Duras, Yasujirō Ozu, Carl Theodor Dreyer, and Michael Snow, whose films she was able to view while working as an usher at the newly established Pacific Film Archive at the Berkeley Art Museum. In 1976, she spent a year at the Centre d’Études Américain du Cinéma in Paris studying psychoanalytic and semiotic approaches to film history and theory. She later edited Apparatus, a volume of essays by avant-garde filmmakers and theorists that interrogates the cinematic apparatus, or “the function of film, the film’s author, the effects produced on the viewer while viewing film.”17 The book – which includes work by Roland Barthes, Jean-Louis Baudry, Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, Maya Deren, Christian Metz, Dziga Vertov and an original experimental text by Cha herself – aimed to “turn backwards and call upon the machinery that creates the impression of reality whose function, inherent in its very medium, is to conceal from its spectator the relationship of the viewer/subject to the work being viewed.”18
Unveiling this matrix of relationships was itself a political act with revolutionary ambitions for the writers and filmmakers assembled in the volume, who understood that relations of domination are reproduced not only on the level of narrative content but also on the level of filmic form, production and reception. Baudry’s essay argues that the primary ideological effect of the cinematic apparatus is the production of an illusory continuity, achieved by concealing cinema’s “technical base” – the assemblage of camera, projector, screen and the attendant labour that makes any given film possible. Not only does mainstream cinema privilege narrative continuity, it also, through the passive, dream-like condition of spectatorship in the darkened theatre and the psychoanalytic processes of subject identification, facilitates absorption into the filmic illusion and enables the fantasy of a unified viewing subject.19 Marxist thinkers like Baudry sought to interrogate the ideological function of this subject position vis-à-vis capitalist relations of exploitation. Contemporaneous feminist film criticism, such as Laura Mulvey’s 1975 manifesto ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, would further extend these claims, calling attention to the way that the cinematic apparatus’s suppression of difference also reproduced conditions of patriarchal domination. Cha was familiar with and engaged in these feminist debates.20
‘Re Dis Appearing’ (1977)
If the illusion of continuity underpins both the logic of the capitalist, patriarchal symbolic order and commercial narrative cinema, the political avant-garde of the time sought to mobilise discontinuity as a means of disrupting these structures of domination. Cha’s aesthetics of fragmentation emerge against this backdrop as techniques of counter-cinema. She scatters images across multiple monitors, fuses performance and projection, and isolates aspects of cinema’s technical apparatus – the boundaries of the frame in ‘Vidéoème’ (1976), the intervallic flicker of projection in ‘Permutations’ (1976), the asynchrony of video and sound tracks in ‘Re Dis Appearing’ (1977) – in order to disrupt the scene of passive spectatorship. However, Cha did not merely aim to deconstruct a dominant mode, but also to use these fragments to imagine new forms of intimacy and collectivity. In ‘Paths’, she writes:
Inspiration given to an artist, Imagination breathed upon, breathed into him/her […] insists upon a communion with the audience, to create a space where the audience are left free to imagine, to remember their own memories. […] In this way, the piece become[s] an intimate sharing, a collective experience, of the collective memory and imagination.21
By inviting personal reflection on one’s positioning with respect to the artwork, Cha hoped to inaugurate a shared transformation of perception, rooted in a new experience of time. She understood the audience’s encounter with the artwork in the present as a simultaneous experience of the past through memory. For Cha, time was not a linear progression from past to future, but cyclical and overlapping. This belief formed the core of both her aesthetic and political vision, as suggested by her fragmentation of “re volution” into its etymological parts: re (again) and volution (a revolving movement). Turning back, she insists, is what allows one to move forward, enabling an interrogation of the conditions that make the present possible.
‘Permutations’ (1976)
Cha’s interest in the mutual entanglement of past and present likely accounts for her turn toward the moving image. Maya Deren’s essay in Apparatus frames cinema as a form of visual memory due to its language of juxtaposition: “the celluloid memory of the camera can function, as our memory, not merely to reconstruct or to measure an original chronology. It can place together, in immediate temporal sequence, events actually distant, and achieve, through such relationship, a peculiarly filmic reality.”22 In cinema’s ability to compose non-linear chronologies, Cha found the ideal material infrastructure for her artistic vision – one which employed new collective experiences of the past (“collective memory”) to generate present and future transformations “collective imagination”). White Dust’s script reveals this rigorous engagement with cinema’s temporal structure. Cha envisioned the film as:
a simultaneous account of a narrative, beginning at two separate points in Time. The two points function almost as two distinct narratives, the ‘Times’ overlap during the diegesis of the film, and a final conversion of the two points is achieved to one complete superimposition, to one point in Time.
One narrative begins with Character #1, the unnamed amnesiac, at a time set “in the Past, within the interior of memory itself. The memory materializes physically on the screen (film projected on the screen is the memory projected—the viewer ‘sees’ physically the memory images).” The other, following a second, unnamed character, “begins in the Present,” and when this character “returns and gives memory to [the amnesiac],” gradually the two become one.23
Here Cha uses the act of film projection to map memory – the summoning of the past into the present – onto the cinematic apparatus, a move which is echoed in her description of the second narrative, that of regaining memory, as the “défilement même du récit.” This phrase reiterates the English description she uses to assign a function to the second character, who engages “the Telling and Relaying process” of the story. However, défilement is also a specific technical term referring to cinematic projection and the unfurling of the film reel as it winds through the machine. Cha’s interest lies in the generative activity of the cinematic – the movement which animates the stilled images on the filmstrip, bringing the traces of the past to life in the present. The overarching structure of the film as the “final conversion of the two points…to one complete superimposition, to one point in Time” mirrors both the condition of cinematic spectatorship, in its bridging of the time between the production of the images and their projection, and the operation of memory. As Deren clarifies, in memory, “[man] has access to all his experience simultaneously. He can compare the beginning of a process to the end of it, without accepting it as a homogeneous totality.”24 This ability to circumvent “natural chronology” to examine the development of an experience is precisely what opens up memory, for Cha, as a political practice.25
Nevertheless, some critics have read Cha’s evasion of direct documentation of political struggles and her turn toward the past as a form of historical and political withdrawal. Ed Park contends that White Dust From Mongolia represents a “crucial defeat” within Cha’s oeuvre, not only due to its incomplete status but also in its failure to integrate any reference to the contemporary violence she witnessed in Seoul. He critiques the “fussy abstraction” of the unnamed amnesiac as collective metaphor, suggesting that it is insufficient to reckon with the specific socio-historical conditions of the violence which erupted during Cha’s visit to Korea, and further takes issue with the fact that “rather than landing in Korea and seeing how it might inspire her, Cha had mapped out the film beforehand.”26 Park takes this as evidence that Cha’s own status as exile predetermined what she expected to see in Korea, concluding that such prearrangement is emblematic of the profound disconnection between Cha’s life in the United States and Korea, and between her aesthetic form – “artfully assembled history” – and the “actual history that surrounded her as soon as she set foot in Seoul.”27
However, throughout her practice Cha consistently utilised abstraction and fragmentation as techniques of political and historical engagement, as conscious alternatives to more conventional forms of representation and their attendant limitations. Her preface to Apparatus opens with Jean-Luc Godard’s distinction between “making a political film and making a film politically”; Cha would devote herself to the latter project in White Dust, which emphasises the “relationships between the images” to reveal their ideological positioning, their “relations of production.”28 Her poetic, allegorical approach to history extrapolates from the local event to identify the broader patterns of historical experience that condition it. She may not have been aware of all of the nuances of contemporary Korean politics, but the tumult that she witnessed upon her return was all too familiar. In Dictee, she laments,
here at my return in eighteen years, the war is not ended. We fight the same war. We are inside the same struggle seeking the same destination. We are severed in Two by an abstract enemy an invisible enemy under the title of liberators who have conveniently named the severance, Civil War. Cold War. Stalemate. I am in the same crowd, the same coup, the same revolt, nothing has changed.29
Cha experienced history as painfully reiterative. For her, to represent the cyclical nature of history was not to reify its inevitability, but rather to interrogate the mechanisms that perpetuate violence – here, the lasting interventions of U.S. imperialism after the Korean War, “an invisible enemy under the title of liberators.” White Dust’s script is punctuated by visual references to imperial violence in scenes from the amnesiac’s lost past: a room divided in two, evoking the division of Korea into North and South; a white soldier spraying DDT on a woman attempting to cross this partition; a line of people “waiting with canteens for rations from the U.S. government.”30 By structuring her film around the non-linear temporality of memory, Cha attempts to approach history by other means. Rather than assimilating the fragments of the past into a continuous narrative, she insists upon their contingency by rendering her film open to plural, but not infinite, associations. For, contrary to what Park asserts, there is also specificity in Cha’s abstraction, references which anchor her film to her own experience – images of the street where her family lived, family photos from Busan, and visual citations of her other work, including her performances ‘Reveille Dans La Brume’ (1977) and ‘Pause Still’ (1979) – as well as to Korea’s tumultuous history.
If the transmission of dominant history is bound to the violence of “colonial and patriarchal discourses”, as Shelley Sunn Wong argues, memory, for Cha, offered an alternative, feminist model of kinship and transmission that registered but also exceeded this violence.31 Throughout her work, the memories shared and passed between generations of women give shape to another kind of history, one that illuminates the patriarchal, colonial conditions of women’s erasure as well as the forms of labour, care and sacrifice through which they survive it. In a letter to her friend Yong Soon Min, written during her trip to film White Dust, Cha wrote, “I am in spite of everything seeing the great presence of women, the woman’s space, the woman holding the weight of all Asian societies, or is that a grandiose generalization?”32 White Dust makes women’s foundational presence clear. The female amnesiac’s multiple identities as “young girl at the cinema – maid crouching on the ground, her back turned – merchant woman on ferry – marketplace – orphan – nation, a historical condition, Mother, Memory” articulates a complex series of linkages which reposition “nation” and “historical condition” as assemblages of feminine labor and reproduction. In White Dust, the cinema is not only anchored in a feminine gaze (through the “young girl at the cinema,” and the amnesiac herself) but is also what, through its language of juxtaposition, weaves the social fabric of the film as a network of feminine relations, linking domestic and commercial labor (“maid, merchant woman, marketplace”) to forms of kinship and feminine genealogy (“orphan,” “Mother,” “Memory”). By centring this “woman’s space” in a heterogeneous montage of daily life, Cha sought to counter dominant representations of Korean history. “Korea, to many people has little identity of its own, except that it is synonymous with the war that occurred in 1950 to 1953,” she contends, continuing, “outside the major historical facts, little is revealed about the people themselves.”33 By contrast, Cha intended to base her project on interviews with people who had lived through the Japanese occupation and exile in China.34 Although the experimental form of her film eschewed direct historical documentation, White Dust is grounded in an archival ethic, serving as a material embodiment of collective feminine experience. Cha understood memory not only as a psychic phenomenon but also a form of embodied knowledge, and aimed to develop memory in White Dust as “a collective source, as almost having physical and organic dimensions,” a “body of time […] within which our existence is marked like a wound.”35
‘Mouth to Mouth’ (1975)
This framing of memory also led Cha to foreground cinematic spectatorship as an embodied experience, expanding the understanding often advanced in apparatus theory. As evidenced by ‘Paths’, rather than positioning the spectator solely as an abstract subject position vis-à-vis the work of art, Cha theorised spectators as embodied agents who carried their own memories with them to the cinema. Cha saw the unique interaction between the spectator’s memories and the memories “embodied” onscreen in the filmic image as a catalyst for transformation, recasting cinematic spectatorship as an act of creativity and collaboration rather than passivity. White Dust’s final sequence evokes Cha’s own experimental performances, which combined slide and film projection within live performances to reconfigure the conditions of cinematic spectatorship explored by Baudry and others – darkened rooms, flickering light, and hypnotic suspension before the screen. After a montage of images from the amnesiac’s newly remembered past, the film cuts to an empty cinema. The amnesiac appears in the aisle as projections of her past show on the screen in the cinema; she then “walks into the image slowly … physically enter[ing] the image.” The film subsequently concludes with the camera tracking back from the screen, which now displays the image of the empty cinema itself, a doubling which places the spectator in the same position occupied by the amnesiac just a moment before – at the cinema, encountering an image she has experienced in the (filmic) past. In its attempt to bridge the space-time of her prospective audience, and the imaginary space-time of the film, the final sequence enacts the invitation to ‘communion’ Cha theorises in ‘Paths’, transforming passive reception into active, mutual exchange.
For Cha, collectivity was generated beyond the frame, rather than figured within it, and as such required multiple points of entry – “open scenes anyone can relate to,” as Bernadette Cha describes White Dust.36 However, Cha’s work did not theorise the passage from the shared to the collective – that is, how individual spectators could transform a shared encounter with the work of art into a catalyst for collective struggle beyond the text. Hers was neither a militant nor a confrontational cinema. In a letter to her friend Carol Klinger, sent just a few months before her murder, Cha wrote, “the destruction that we are capable of creating (creating—my god) infecting our environment, day in and day out, the avenues in which people operate in order to make the fittest, survive. I don’t believe in it. Although it is all around me, it affects me, it is pathetic, and I am co-existant of it.”37 She continues, “I do not want to escape, necessarily, although I think perhaps retreat is the most positive and sensible thing to do for a fragile being like myself, but rather, I would like to see it as affirming the potential, the possibility of a more human life more sane, more serene.”38
Yet if Cha thought she was more suited to imagining this life than struggling to build it, this does not diminish the strength of her imagination. Cha’s devastating death, the fragmented state of her archive, and the scarcity of details about her personal life have led to readings that emphasise silence, impasse, and lack, often foreclosing the possibility of drawing political claims from her work. There is “not [a] clear alignment with a feminist agenda,” a recent exhibition of her work hedged, although without clarifying what that agenda might be.39 But the enduring political force of Cha’s work is the very framework it develops for remaking sites of loss as sites of possibility, breathing new vitality into scenes of historical impasse. Cha sought not to ‘escape’ or disavow the pain she bore and witnessed, but rather to transform it into the ground for new intimacies, inviting us to realise a different kind of world, “more sane, more serene.” She made room for women’s voices, histories, and labour, and unveiled the infrastructure that marginalised them. Her cinematic work is an extension of this feminist project.
Furthermore, by mobilising the formal apparatus of the cinematic to engender new forms of collective experience, Cha expanded and rethought the structural foundations of the cinema itself. She recast the cinematic encounter as a scene of mutual exchange, summoning histories that never were as histories that still could be. “All that i have forgotten only manifests in another form/ manifests in another form in the future affects the future,” she once insisted.40 Cha’s work was in dialogue with feminist and avant-garde cinemas of her own time, but it is also at the vanguard of theoretical debates and transformations in the art form which would continue to animate film practice and theory in the decades after her death. The turn toward phenomenology, affect, and sense perception beyond the visible, the migration of moving image work from the theatre to the gallery, and flourishing of diasporic and intercultural cinemas are but a few continuing manifestations of Cha’s forgotten vision. We are still fighting for the world Cha longed for, a world free from patriarchy, imperialism, destruction. To return to her work is to remember to imagine otherwise.
1. In Honor of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Hyung Soon Cha/Family and friends of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (1983). 2. This renewed interest was due in large part to feminist scholars Hyun Yi Kang, Elaine H. Kim, Lisa Lowe and Shelley Sunn Wong, whose compiled collection of essays, Writing Self, Writing Nation (1994), situated Dictee in relation to Korean and Korean-American material histories and postcolonial feminisms. 3. The Cha family’s donation of her archive to the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) led to a major retrospective of her visual work in 2001, The Dream of the Audience: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (1951-1982), which introduced her work to world audiences for the first time. A collection of her early writings, edited by Constance Lewallen, Exilée—Temps Morts—Selected Works, was published in 2009, and since then BAMPFA has digitised large portions of her archive. Nevertheless, most scholarly engagement with Cha privileges her experimental writing over her visual work, and, to date, the first full-length monograph on Cha’s visual work, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha: Berkeley, 1968 (2013) by Elvan Zabunyan, has not been translated into English. 4. Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, White Dust From Mongolia (1980) script, 2. Theresa Hak Kyung Cha Conceptual Art Archive, Berkeley Art Museum, University of California, Berkeley. 5. Ibid., 1. 6. Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, White Dust From Mongolia book proposal, 1. Theresa Hak Kyung Cha Conceptual Art Archive, Berkeley Art Museum, University of California, Berkeley. 7. Quoted in Cathy Park Hong, Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning, One World, 2020, 206-207. 8. Translation mine; original: “une urgence qui, paradoxalement, s’accompagne d’une temporalité très lente, comme si elle était déterminée à donner son propre temps, sa propre durée, à ses œuvres.” Elvan Zabunyan, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha- Berkeley-1968, Dijon, France: les presses du réel, 2013, 28. 9. Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, ‘Artist’s Statement/ Summary of Work, 1.’ Theresa Hak Kyung Cha Conceptual Art Archive, Berkeley Art Museum, University of California, Berkeley. 10. Ibid. 11. Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, ‘Passages Paysages’ (1978) rough sketch. Theresa Hak Kyung Cha Conceptual Art Archive, Berkeley Art Museum, University of California, Berkeley. 12. Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, ‘Passages Paysages’ (1978) description. Theresa Hak Kyung Cha Conceptual Art Archive, Berkeley Art Museum, University of California, Berkeley. 13. Cha received a B.A. in Comparative Literature (1973), a B.A. in Art (1975), an M.A. in Art (1977) and an M.F.A in Art (1978). 14. Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, ‘Paths’ (MFA Thesis) (1978), 5. Theresa Hak Kyung Cha Conceptual Art Archive, Berkeley Art Museum, University of California, Berkeley. 15. Paths., 1. 16. Ibid. 17. Apparatus-Cinematographic Apparatus: Selected Writings, ed. Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Tanam Press 1980, preface. 18. Ibid. 19. Jean-Louis Baudry (tr. Alan Williams), ‘Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus’, Apparatus, pp. 25-37. 20. Cha’s friend Judith Barry, who organised the women’s performance event series ‘Seven Sundays After the Fall’ and accompanying discussion groups on feminist theory, recalls that Cha closely followed these readings and that Mulvey’s essay was a centerpiece of discussion. Quoted in Constance Lewallen, ‘Introduction: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha—Her Time and Place’, The Dream of the Audience: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (1951-1982) ed. Constance M. Lewallen, University of California Press, 2001, p. 10. 21. ‘Paths’, 3. 22. Maya Deren, ‘An Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form, and Film’, Apparatus, 134. 23. White Dust From Mongolia script, 1-3. 24. Deren, 100. 25. Ibid. 26. Ed Park, ‘This is the writing you have been waiting for’, in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Selected Works ed. Constance Lewallen, 13. 27. Ibid., 14. 28. Jean-Luc Godard, quoted in Cha, ‘Preface’, Apparatus. 29. Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Dictee, University of California Press, 2001), p. 81. 30. White Dust From Mongolia script, 5. 31. Shelley Sunn Wong, ‘Unnaming the Same: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée’, in Writing Self, Writing Nation ed. Elaine H. Kim and Norma Alarcón, Third Woman Press, 1994, p. 110. 32. Quoted in Constance Lewallen, ‘Introduction: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha—Her Time and Place’, p. 10. 33. White Dust book proposal, 1. 34. Ibid., 2. 35. Ibid., my emphasis. 36. Archival notes, White Dust From Mongolia. 37. Excerpts from letter to Carol Klinger, dated July 9,1982, published in In Honor of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. 38. Ibid. 39. Bea de Sousa and Juliette Desgorgues, ‘A Portrait in Fragments: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha 1951-1932’, (Bea De Sousa and Korean Cultural Center UK, December 2013), 40. Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, ‘poems and journal entries related to White Dust From Mongolia’ (1980), in Selected Works ed. Constance Lewallen, 157.
Katie Kirkland is a writer and researcher based in New York. She is working toward her Ph.D in Film & Comparative Literature at Yale, where she researches contemporary experimental documentary.