“Her movements are already punctuated by the movement of the camera, her pace, her time, her rhythm. You move from the same distance as the visitor, with the same awe, same reticence, the same anticipation. […] All along, you see her without actually seeing, actually having seen her. You do not see her. For the moment, you see only her traces.” – Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Dictee
Wendy’s Subway and Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) are pleased to collaborate with Spectacle on a one-night-only screening of film and video works by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, alongside works by Sujin Lee and Jesse Chun, artists influenced by her practice.
This program is a part of Wendy’s Subway’s The Quick and the Dead, a yearlong, multi-phase project that bridges the life, work, and legacy of a deceased writer to those of contemporary practitioners. In its third year, the program focuses on Korean American artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (1951–1982), and considers her profound interventions in film and video, historiography, language and translation, and autobiographical writing. Cha’s exploration of the porousness between artistic mediums leaves indelible marks on contemporary art, especially film and video.
Program:
THERESA HAK KYUNG CHA PROJECT
dir. Sujin Lee, 2015
24:28 mins. South Korea.
술래 SULLAE
dir. Jesse Chun, 2020
6:25 mins. United States.
MOUTH TO MOUTH
dir. Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, 1975
8 mins. United States.
PERMUTATIONS
dir. Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, 1976
10 mins. United States.
RE DIS APPEARING
dir. Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, 1977
2:30 mins. United States.
SECRET SPILL
dir. Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, 1974
27 mins. United States.
VIDÉOÈME
dir. Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, 1976
4:42 mins. United States.
Total runtime 83 minutes.
SUJIN LEE is an artist currently living and working in Seoul, South Korea. She works with language in text, moving image, and performance. Lee’s work has been presented at Arko Art Center, Kumho Art Museum, Cake Gallery, Wumin Art Center in South Korea, the Bronx Museum of the Arts, Queens Museum, A.I.R. Gallery, Mandeville Gallery at Union College, NURTUREart, Brooklyn Arts Exchange, Small Editions in New York, US, and the Sergey Kuryokhin Modern Art Center in Saint Petersburg, Russia, among others. She participated in artist residencies, including the Millay Colony for the Arts, Blue Mountain Center, I-Park, Newark Museum, Zarya Center for Contemporary Art, and Artkommunalka. She is a recipient of the A.I.R. Gallery Fellowship (2012-2013), SeMA Emerging Artist & Curators Program grant (2016), and Wumin Art Award (2018).
JESSE CHUN is an artist working and living in New York. Chun’s work has been presented internationally at the Nam June Paik Art Center (South Korea); SculptureCenter, New York; the Drawing Center, New York; BAM, New York; Queens Museum, New York; the Vera List Center for Art and Politics, New York (United States); and the Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto (Canada), among others. Recent awards and fellowships include Art by Translation (Paris, 2022); Ballroom Marfa (Texas, 2021), and the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant (US, 2020).
From the mid-1970s until her death at age 31 in 1982, Korean-born artist THERESA HAK KYUNG CHA created a rich body of conceptual art that explored displacement and loss. Her works included artists’ books, mail art, performance, audio, video, film, and installation. Although grounded in French psychoanalytic film theory, her art is also informed by far-ranging cultural and symbolic references, from shamanism to Confucianism and Catholicism. Her collage-like book Dictée, which was published posthumously in 1982, is recognized as an influential investigation of identity in the context of history, ethnicity and gender.
Wendy’s Subway is a reading room, writing space, and independent publisher in Bushwick, Brooklyn. They support emerging artists and writers in making experimental, urgent work and create alternative modes for learning and thinking in community.
Founded in 1971, Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) is a nonprofit arts organization that is a leading international resource for video and media art. A pioneering advocate for media art and artists, EAI’s core program is the distribution and preservation of a major collection of over 4,000 new and historical video works by artists. For 50 years, EAI has fostered the creation, exhibition, distribution and preservation of video art, and more recently, digital art projects.