While not offering closure in a traditional sense, Cha’s art and writing refuses to look away from the pain, urging us to contend with the ways our society obscures the history of harm against Asian American and immigrant women. Cha’s oeuvre grapples with the inexpressible, enacting what it is like to wade through and process painful histories and memories.Ĭha’s own focus on systemic oppressions necessitates some engagement with her own passing, since the very same racialized, gendered, and sexualized conditions continue to mark our own world. GYOPO points to the “racialized and sexualized murders of Asian American and immigrant women within the public sphere,” including the Atlanta spa shootings in March, and how silence and shaming warps the discourse surrounding these tragedies.

She rejected the rules of assimilation, instead drawn to the stories obscured by structural oppressions. Cha, the artist’s brother and biographer, in addition to Laura Hyun Yi Kang, a scholar and Gender Studies professor at UC Irvine, and Lawrence Rinder, a curator and former director of BAMPFA.īorn in South Korea before emigrating with her family to San Francisco at the age of 12, Cha was deeply marked by her familial history of migration and displacement caused by military dictatorships and numerous colonialisms. The event will include presentations by John M. A few video works from the Theresa Hak Kyung Cha archive at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) will also be on view. With support from USC Vision and Voices and in collaboration with Deaf West Theater, Deaf and hearing volunteers will read the entirety of Dictee, simultaneously speaking in ASL and spoken language while pages from the book are projected in the background. Tragically, in 1982, one week after the publication of Dictee, Cha was raped and murdered by security guard and serial rapist Joseph Sanza. Dictee, her only book, is considered her magnum opus. Cha, an influential Korean American artist and writer, explored the nuances of diaspora, forced migration, language, and time in her sinuous experiments in performance, text, and video. On Saturday, December 4, the group will host their first in-person event of the year at Meldman Family Cinematic Arts Park, USC School of Cinematic Arts, a marathon reading of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee (Cha’s archive notes that the artist intended the title to be unitalicized, one small example of the ways she bent language into her own form). LOS ANGELES - Since 2017, GYOPO, a nonprofit coalition of diasporic Korean artists, cultural producers, and professionals based in Los Angeles, has been organizing artist talks, screenings, workshops, and other public programs in an effort to provide space for cross-cultural conversations.

Dictee by theresa hak kyung cha