Teresa Hak Kyung Cha’s poetry scanned at Whitney and Hessel Museums – ARTnews.com

Photo documentation of Teresa Hak Kyung Chae Aveugle Voix (1975), the artist is shown all white, squatting, with black hair flowing to her ankles. While performing in San Francisco, Cha tied her eyes with a white cloth over them voice (French for sound) was stenciled in black, and another band wrapped around her mouth AVEUGLE (blind). Then she opened a scroll that read: “The words / failure / I” and “aviogel / voice / without / death / none / I ”(blind / voice / without / word / without / I). Depending on whether one reads from below, in the order in which the words appear gradually, or from above, after they are all revealed, the lines form polysemy: How is one muted by the eye, and blind by the mouth? The title of the work, literally ‘The Blind Voice’, could be a pun for the ‘blind’ (aveugle voit). Viewers trying to unravel such paradoxes will be disappointed, as these ambiguities are part of Cha’s long courtship with instability within language, and between language and experience. In a 1975 video mouth to mouth, a sea of ​​black-and-white stillness slowly turns to reveal an open mouth, extending in variations of its O to denote vowels in Korean, which Cha speaks fluently, along with French and English. However, it does not make any sound; Instead, we hear the sound of flowing water and the chirping of birds, which are sometimes interrupted by the crackling sounds of electrical interference. The work suggests an earlier investigation into how we physically acclimatized to a “native language” long before we spoke it. In the meantime, the choppy sounds suggest some kind of birth, both of a child and of the language itself.

Cha’s investigations into social and psychological mechanics and the effects of language are on display in two New York exhibitions this spring and through summer: a mini-retrospective “Near the Public” at Bard College’s Heysel Museum of Art, meticulously curated by an MBA graduate Maine. Sun Geun, and a selection of works at this year’s Whitney Biennale, “Quiet As Preserved,” curated by David Breslin and Adrian Edwards. Aveugle Voix And the mouth to mouth In both shows, as well as the artist’s feature film, white dust from mongolia (1980), her work on the art of mail Close to the audience (1977). The final piece is an artist’s handbook of seven white folded sheets of paper with an abstract label, when closed, with headings including “Object/Theme”, “Messenger” and “Echo”. The texts installed in a glass display contain poetic rumination. The messenger is the voice presence / who occupies the place. / Presence of voice running / Time in between,” Cha writes in one. “I can only assume you can hear me / I can only hope you can hear me,” she pleads in another message.

The exhibition of the same name in Bard opens with this work, but unlike Whitney’s installation, the postal works here are accompanied by an audio piece in which the artist utters a mantra uttering softly and disturbingly lively: “In our relationship / I am the subject / You are the subject…. In our relationship / You The subject/I am the subject. This work sets the stage for the exhibition, which draws the artist’s attention to the audience as energized by Cha’s manipulation, repetition, and reduction of words and images. In a text accompanying the Paths, her 1978 Master of Fine Arts thesis at the University of California, Berkeley states, “The artist, like an alchemist, establishes a ‘covenant’ with his elements, as well as with … the spectator. The artist becomes the object of the viewer, the viewer as the subject, and the artist as the subject, and the viewer as the subject. …and through the presence of the “other,” any form of communication is created and complemented.” Cha is perfectly in line with how verbal and nonverbal communication is engineered, leaving openings for visitors to join in the echoes and rhythms of her slightly erratic work, and even It becomes encased in its own logic of twisted and unnatural temporality that reverberates in and through it. Text, images, books, video, movies, slides, projections, and presentations.

The Bard Gallery’s rhythm honors Cha’s use of associations, echoes, and undulations. Sometimes, sounds from different films reverberate and intersect in an intricate dance, so much so that it can be difficult to trace the origin of any one sound. The soft muslin cloth limits an area in the heart of the gallery encase lane payments (Landscape Corridors, 1978), a three-channel non-linear video installation that includes footage from photographs of Cha’s family, creased rooms and beds, letters, and the artist’s hand. What is remarkable again is the presence of the artist’s voice, which alternates between her three fluently speaking tongues. Sometimes she seems to address us directly, while in other cases we seem to have stumbled into her inner thoughts: “불 켜봐, 불 켜봐” (turn on the light, turn on the light), she says. “불 꺼져, 끄지 마, 지금 꺼” (the light is off, don’t turn it off, turn it off now). “아직 끄지 마” (Do not turn it off yet). Here, she conveys her preoccupation with communication, as well as the barriers to its transmission—unless said or heard.

Cha .-type cross biographical text readers dict (1982) You’ll be familiar with her formal, conceptual style of creating simultaneous and parallel conversations across multiple speakers and speakers, such as the Nine Myths of Greek Mythology, Joan of Arc, Saint Therese, Korean revolutionary Yoo Gwan Sun, and soon-to-be Cha Hyung’s mother Huo (first edition of the book is shown) From the Bard Library Archive). Born in 1951 in Busan, South Korea, Cha’s polyglot was shaped by her family’s 1962 emigration to the United States, where she also learned French. The Japanese occupation of Korea between 1909 and 1945 was such a must for her mother that she was forced to remain in Manchuria where she was born. There, too, the Japanese banned the Korean language, but she continued to speak it privately as she multiplied at this historic juncture between Korea, China, and Japan. “You speak the obligatory language like other languages,” Cha writes. dict. “It’s not yours. Even if it’s not, you know you should. You’re bilingual. You’re trilingual. A forbidden tongue is your mother tongue.. Your mother tongue is your refuge. It’s back home.”

Located at the fault points between languages, dict He details how displacement and colonial encounters can induce alternative articulations of the self, always conditioned and relational. Similarly, in Chronology (1977), included in “Close Close to the Public,” eighteen color copies of Cha’s family photos disrupt the typical linearity and healthy publicity of such albums. Images of Cha’s mother, father, and siblings are repeated in violet ink and sometimes overlaid until they become unperceivable, while the friction between the figure and the message is heightened by hand-engraved bits of text: shadow of timeAnd the partial soreness / ac. work sister Chronology Included in the Biennale: The Black and White Picture Book is somewhat sterile in its presentation presence absence (1975), with its plain black cover, displayed in a glass window alongside a digital video of its pages, which features dotted subtitles of family photos used in Chronology. Cha’s publication of material deterioration and distorted transformations of her family portraits parallels her use of the consonant voice in mouth to mouth: By distorting the source, she highlights how translation can open up the possibility of adding another layer not only of dissonance, but also enrichment and expansion. It did a postcolonial struggle between genealogy, history, and narratives across regions of language, stripping away the idea of ​​original source purity and offering instead an exposition of how languages ​​move each other around dynamically.

white dust from mongolia, on display at both exhibitions, also takes on physical, psychological and linguistic displacement as his subject matter. It consists of slow motion film footage of train tracks, zigzag shots of Koreans in a market, and scenes from a plane ride in a seemingly deserted theme park, among other daily shots of Korean life, white dust It is a type of trip that Cha and her brother filmed on a three-month trip to their home country in 1980. As she wrote in the film’s original sketches, it was intended “to be a simultaneous telling of a story beginning at two separate points in time”, and it focuses on A young Korean woman living in China follows the arc of her loss of memory and ability to speak. Cha’s emigration and exile, her wandering intellectual curiosity, is broken by her detailed descriptions of stills and notes for the film and other projects she was working on that same year, all on display at The Bard. (While working on white dustedit cha Organ, cinematic apparatus: selected compositions, published by the Tanam Press in 1980, with articles on cinema by Roland Barthes, Dziga Vertov, Maya Derain, Jan-Marie Straub and Danielle Hillet, among others.) and the suppression of the mass protests that followed. These actions culminated in the Gwangju Massacre, where civilians celebrated a brief government retreat before the rebellion was crushed.

None of this turmoil is portrayed in the film, though, reflecting Cha’s distinctively allegorical and slanted approach to looking at the world around her, as well as Jean-Luc Godard’s distinction between “making a political film and making a political film.” that opened the introduction to her device. fit the last camp, white dust Extant only in fragments, it was left unfinished after Cha’s murder in 1982 at the age of 31.

The relative obscurity of Cha’s work during her lifetime was followed by a few notable events in the gallery in the early decades following her death, including “A Public’s Dream,” a retrospective of Cha’s work curated by Constance Lawalen at the Berkeley Museum of Art and Pacific Film. Archives in 2001. In light of the continuing and successive social and political meltdowns of the twentieth century that continue to cast a shadow over contemporary life, Cha’s prescient proposal of semantic and psychological fracture as a new constructive principle seems to resonate increasingly with a broader audience that includes many. Contemporary artists. In Whitney, for example, a three-channel infrared holographic video installation by Korean artist Na Mira weaves the history of Korean feminism and shamanism with biographical, vividly displaying images from Cha white dust; Cha’s illustrative ellipsoidal voice – “우린 다른 시간 에 왔어” (we arrived at various times) – along with camera glitches and flickering took Cha’s embodiment of diaspora memory, which alludes to something known but not yet expressed, pleading for his release. . As Cha writes in dict: “She murmurs on the inside. She murmurs. Inside is the pain of speaking the pain of saying. Still greater. Greater than the pain that is not said. Not to say. He says nothing against the pain in speech. It aggravates on the inside. The wound, liquid, dust. It must be broken. It must be invalidated.”