Theresa Hak Kyung Cha 車學慶

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 undi erentiated 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.

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Born in 1951 in Busan. Died in 1982 in New York City.

1951 年生於釜山；

1982 年卒於紐約。

車學慶的錄像實驗常以極簡的方式呈現，它們探問如何透過圖像、聲音及語言的重新組合來 創造新的意義。在她的作品中，車氏以她獨特的藝術感知連接起視覺藝術、前衛詩歌、女性主義 理論以及藝術家自身的離散經驗。例如，在《嘴對嘴》中，鏡頭特寫藝術家模糊的嘴，仿若貝克特 的舞台劇，嘴緩慢且無聲地吐出韓文中八個元音音節。在猶若一片汪洋的電子干擾中，影像以 一系列溶接的方式呈現，背景是不時插入柔和水流聲的白噪音。車氏的作品旨在尋找「語言在 流淌至舌尖之前的根源」，她相信所有語言所共有的可能性，亦即語言在被聆聽、理解、及識別 單一民族身份之前就已經具備的豐富表達能力。車氏在美國的生活使她充分感受到作為移民 所遭遇的語言和外來文化的拉扯，她的作品因此探索個體主體性與「母語」的關係，她的作品 亦涉及對其他更宏大的地緣政治議題的關注，例如朝鮮日治時期四十年間所推行的民族身份 政策及遭受的語言控制。 Vidéoème, 1976. Video (black & white, sound), 4'42".《 Vidéoème 》，1976 年。錄像（黑白，有聲），8 分 42 秒。 Mouth to Mouth, 1975. Video (black & white, sound), 8'.《嘴對嘴》，1975 年。錄像（黑白，有聲），8 分。 Courtesy of the Collection of the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, and Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York. Gift of the Theresa Hak Kyung Cha Memorial Foundation. 由加州大學柏克萊分校館藏、Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive及紐約 Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI)提供。由車學慶紀念基金會贈予。©Regents of the University of California. 加州大學版權所有。13 THERESA HAK KYUNG CHA車學慶