Theresa Hak Kyung Cha: Multiple Offerings

On January 24, the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) opens Theresa Hak Kyung Cha: Multiple Offerings, the largest exhibition to date on Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (1951–1982), marking the first time in 25 years that this influential artist will be the subject of a major retrospective. Featuring more than one hundred objects and ephemera drawn primarily from BAMPFA’s collection and archives, the exhibition spans the full breadth of Cha’s multifaceted career across conceptual art, film, performance, and text-based media. Multiple Offerings presents aspects of the artist’s practice that have never been publicly displayed—including early experiments in ceramics and fiber—and highlights Cha’s critical explorations into language, memory, and diasporic identity. Underscoring her ongoing influence, the exhibition situates Cha within a constellation of artworks by her contemporaries and peers, as well as those by artists working today who have contributed to her lasting legacy. 

Born in Busan, South Korea in 1951, Cha immigrated with her family to the Bay Area in 1964 and was deeply influenced by the avant-garde currents that were reshaping the region’s art scene. As a student at UC Berkeley between 1969 and 1978, where she received undergraduate and graduate degrees in art practice and comparative literature, Cha worked as an art handler and film usher at the University Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (as BAMPFA was then known). Since 1992, BAMPFA has been home to the Cha Collection and Archives, which were generously donated to the museum by the Theresa Hak Kyung Cha Memorial Foundation in the wake of her untimely death. These materials have served as an invaluable resource that has helped catalyze artistic, curatorial, and scholarly attention on Cha’s visionary practice, constituting over 75 percent of the museum’s research requests in recent years.

Best known for her groundbreaking 1982 publication Dictée, a hybrid novel-poem that collages image and text, Cha worked across different media to explore cultural and linguistic displacement and their attendant effects. She was keenly attuned to the active role that audiences play in the creation of meaning and prioritized non-linear narratives to allow for more open-ended forms of interpretation—what she termed a method of “Multiple Telling with Multiple Offering.” The retrospective adopts this framework to allow for a range of entry points into Cha’s work, guiding visitors through the themes—memory, exile, and the mutability of language, among others—that recur throughout her oeuvre. 

 In addition to presenting the full scope of her practice, Multiple Offerings situates Cha within a dynamic group of artistic voices, tracing the exchanges that shaped her work and highlighting her influence on subsequent generations of artists. Works by Jim Melchert, Terry Fox, Reese Williams, and Cecilia Vicuña evoke the collaborative environment in which Cha developed her practice, while works by Renée Green, Yong Soon Min, L. Franklin Gilliam, Na Mira, Jesse Chun, and Cici Wu illuminate her lasting impact. Seen together, the works in the exhibition foreground the rigorous experimentation and radical generosity of a practice that continues to reverberate among new generations of artists and audiences. 

 In conjunction with the retrospective, BAMPFA has published a richly illustrated catalogue—the first museum monograph dedicated to the artist in over twenty years—featuring comprehensive documentation of Cha’s art and archives. Edited and with an introductory essay by Victoria Sung, the volume includes essays by Julia Bryan-Wilson, Jordan Carter, Danielle A. Jackson, Mason Leaver-Yap, and Tausif Noor, as well as a roundtable discussion with artists Na Mira and Cici Wu, moderated by Min Sun Jeon.

“Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s radically interdisciplinary practice defies easy categorization,” said Victoria Sung, BAMPFA’s Phyllis C. Wattis Senior Curator, who curated the exhibition. “Through this retrospective we hope to show the full complexity of her oeuvre and open up the Cha Collection and Archives to future generations of artists and researchers.”

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha: Multiple Offerings will extend and deepen a growing public understanding of Cha’s contributions following her inclusion in recent international exhibitions such as the 2023 Seoul Mediacity Biennale and the 2022 Whitney Biennial. The exhibition’s debut in Berkeley will be followed by a national and international tour, with additional venues to be announced this spring.

“With this exhibition, we are excited to raise awareness of Cha’s work and cement her place in the history of art from UC Berkeley, the Bay Area, and beyond,” said Julie Rodrigues Widholm, BAMPFA’s Executive Director. “Cha's rigorous examination of how identity is shaped by place, language, and form continues to resonate across generations and disciplines.”

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha: Multiple Offerings will be accompanied by a robust series of public programs, including: 

시( )nawi( )fugue (an improvisation, an offering, a reading) 
January 24, 2026 2pm  

Artist Jesse Chun presents the inaugural activation of her new performance series 시(  )nawi(  )fugue. A collective​, improvisational reading​ of her drawing installation, 시: concrete poem, stanza (for all the uninherited and inherited time travelers that hum through the slivers), on view in the exhibition, the performance invokes artistic matriarchs and cultivates spiritual kinship across generations through an engagement with sound, music, open translation, and spoken word. 

Multiple Offerings: New Directions in Research on Theresa Hak Kyung Cha
February 8, 2026 12:30pm

BAMPFA hosts a symposium that highlights new directions in research on Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. Featuring contributions from graduate students and early career researchers, and moderated by UC Berkeley faculty and scholars, the symposium honors the spirit of Cha’s multidisciplinary oeuvre by inviting new scholarship from a range of fields and expanding the existing research on the artist’s visionary practice.

Collective Marathon Reading of Dictée
February 28, 2026 2pm

In collaboration with Small Press Traffic, BAMPFA presents a collective marathon reading of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s genre-defying work Dictée (1982) led by members of the Bay Area arts community. Audience members are encouraged to participate in this collective and open-ended reading.

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and Twentieth-Century Korean History
March 19, 2026 5pm

Korean history punctuated Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s life: She was born in a refugee camp in Busan during the Korean War and returned to South Korea around the time of the Gwangju Democratization Movement. In this lecture, Spencer Lee-Lenfield, Assistant Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature at Harvard University, draws on Cha’s own artworks and her family history to reconstruct how she understood the forces that shaped her life—and how we might contextualize her work across Korean and overseas Korean history.

Cathy Park Hong in Conversation with Brandon Shimoda and Divya Victor
April 4, 2026 1:30pm

Cathy Park Hong, award-winning author of Minor Feelings (2020) and UC Berkeley Professor of English, moderates a lively discussion on the work of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha in relation to themes of imperialism and exile with celebrated poets Brandon Shimoda (The Afterlife Is Letting Go [2024], Hydra Medusa [2023]) and Divya Victor (Curb [2021], Kith [2017]). 

Sentimental Education: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha at the Pacific Film Archive
April 2–19, 2026

Cha’s appreciation for film was shaped in the decade she spent as a student at UC Berkeley, from 1969 to 1978, during which time she attended numerous screenings and talks at the Pacific Film Archive. Bringing together selections from Cha’s studies in film—ranging from Chantal Akerman to Yasujiro Ozu—with her own experiments, Sentimental Education maps the global cinematic influences on this remarkably singular artist.

The above public programs are presented in partnership with UC Berkeley's Center for Korean Studies. Community partnership support provided by GYOPO. More information about these public programs, as well as a full schedule of exhibition tours, is available at bampfa.org.

About Theresa Hak Kyung Cha
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (b. 1951, Busan, South Korea; d. 1982, New York City) emigrated to the United States in 1962, settling first in Hawai’i 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 between 1969 and 1978, receiving 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 hybrid novel-poem that collages poetry, found text, and images; and Apparatus, an anthology of film writings edited by Cha. Before she was murdered in 1982, Cha was awarded an artist's residency 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, 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 museum exhibition as part of its MATRIX series of contemporary art, followed by her first retrospective, The Dream of the Audience (2001), which traveled to seven venues. In 1992, the Theresa Hak Kyung Cha Memorial Foundation donated a major selection 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.

About BAMPFA
Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive ignites cultural change for a more inclusive and artistic world. BAMPFA has been uniquely dedicated to art and film since 1970, with international programming that is locally connected and globally relevant. It holds more than 25,000 artworks and 18,000 films and videos in its collection, with particular strengths in modern and contemporary art and historical Chinese painting, as well as the world’s largest collection of African American quilts. As part of the University of California, Berkeley, BAMPFA is committed to artistic diversity through its robust slate of art exhibitions, film screenings, artist talks, live performances, and educational programs that shed new light on the art of the past and connect audiences with leading filmmakers and artists of our time. BAMPFA sits on the edge of campus and downtown Berkeley, where it welcomes visitors from across and beyond the Bay Area in a repurposed building designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro.

Exhibition credits
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha: Multiple Offerings is curated by Victoria Sung, Phyllis C. Wattis Senior Curator, with Tausif Noor, Curatorial Associate. 

This exhibition is made possible through lead support from Teiger Foundation. Major support is provided by the Terra Foundation for American Art, the Korea Foundation, the Shah Garg Women Artists Research Fund, and the R.J. Bertero Family Fund. Additional support is provided by E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundation, The Jay DeFeo Foundation, Alexandra Bowes, Stephen Cheng, Miyoung Lee, and Robin Wright. The Theresa Hak Kyung Cha Endowment was established in 2003 to support the Cha Collection and Archives at BAMPFA.