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CURTAIN 簾 幕
Bornin 1951in Busan. Diedin 1982in New Yor k City.
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s video experiments are often minimally staged to deconstruct and push the limits of how image, sound, and language recombine to create new meaning. Her legacy was her singular ability to connect the fields of visual art, avant-garde poetry, and feminist theory to a deeply personal history rooted in diasporic experiences of irreconcilability, exile, and permanent displacement. Mouth to Mouth features a Samuel Beckett-like disembodied close-up of the artist’s mouth, which slowly and silently contorts into the shapes of eight Korean vowels. Appearing as a series of dissolves amidst a sea of television static, the images are accompanied by a soundtrack of white noise superimposed with soothing intermissions of flowing water. Looking for the ‘roots of language, before it is at the tip of the tongue’, Cha points to the undifferentiated potential of all languages, a fertile state of expressive possibilities prior to the processes of recognition, interpretation, and perception of a single national identity. This relationship between individual subjectivity and ‘mother tongue’ figured in Cha’s personal experience as an immigrant caught between languages and issues of foreignness living in the United States, while alluding to other struggles on a wider geopolitical level — for example, the control of national identity and suppression of languages in Korea that occurred during the forty-year Japanese occupation.
