Inside is the pain of speech the pain to say. (A characteristic early passage: “It murmurs inside. I could follow the French and Korean-and could call on my parents for help with the Chinese-but I was puzzled by the start-and-stop syntax of Cha’s prose. The first time I tried reading “Dictee,” I kept pausing, rereading, and flipping back. Photos, diagrams, and other images are presented with little or no context. Parts of it are in untranslated Korean, French, and Chinese. Cha’s name is known beyond the circles of the Korean American writers, Asian American scholars, experimental-literature enthusiasts, and conceptual artists who have championed her work for decades with, and despite, this growing recognition of Cha’s achievements, “Dictee” remains bold and challenging-at times forbiddingly so.įragmented and formally innovative, “Dictee” draws on Cha’s own life as well as on Greek mythology, Catholic iconography, and Korean history. In September, “ Dictee”-along with a collection of Cha’s writing and art, “ Exilée and Temps Morts: Selected Works”-was reissued by the University of California Press. The Whitney held a marathon reading of “Dictee.” The New York Times, as part of its “Overlooked” series of “remarkable people” of the past, published an obituary of Cha in January.

Her art was featured in this year’s Whitney Biennial. Recent months have brought a rising interest in Cha. When she died, she was immersed in a book, a film, a critique of advertising, and a piece on the representation of hands. She grew up in the Bay Area, studied at Berkeley, and attended art school in Paris. I was hungry for more ancestors-for additional proof, in other words, that someone like me had existed, which might mean I, a Korean American writer working on a first novel, could also exist as who I hoped to be.Ĭha was born in 1951 and emigrated with her family from South Korea to the United States when she was eleven. I’d heard other Korean American writers invoke her name as one might a patron saint or ancestor, so it was with great excitement that, a decade ago, I picked up a copy of “Dictee.” Back then, I hadn’t read any Korean American writers preceding Cha relatively few Korean writers were publishing books in the United States. Before I ever encountered her writing, this is what I knew about Cha: she worked with language, video, performance, audio, and objects-and she’d died early. Just as it was released, Cha was raped and killed by a security guard. “Dictee,” the Korean American writer and artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s masterpiece, was published in 1982.

Dictee by theresa hak kyung cha