Alongside visionary women whose early deaths contributed to their posthumous canonization — Eva Hesse, Francesca Woodman, Ana Mendieta, and Sylvia Plath — stands the genre-defying Korean American artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. Her experimental novel Dictee, a radical and fragmented autobiography meditating on displacement, the instability of language, and the fragility of memory, was published just days after her murder in 1982, when she was 31. The tragic timing intensified the book’s impact, helping to secure her enduring cult status among artists, writers, and scholars.
In the four decades since her death, a series of exhibitions have gradually illuminated the scope of Cha’s interdisciplinary practice. These include a 1993 exhibition at the Whitney Museum curated by Lawrence Rinder; the presentation of 14 of her films in the 2022 Whitney Biennial; a retrospective at the Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College that same year; and her more recent inclusion in Echo Delay Reverb at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. Together, these projects have offered partial but increasingly expansive views of her work across film, performance, text, and installation. Theresa Hak Kyung Cha: Multiple Offerings is on view at BAMPFA from January 24–April 19, 2026.
For many years, however, Cha’s afterlife was shaped as much by those who encountered her work as by the work itself. Among the artists who took up her legacy in a sustained and probing way is artist and ACT Professor Renée Green, whose own practice has long examined the entanglements of history, geography, memory, and artistic lineage. Green first encountered Dictee shortly after its publication. Drawn in by the enigmatic cover image — a black-and-white photograph of boulders in a pebbled landscape — she recalled: “It related to landscape, but you didn’t know what it was. It could be a moonscape. It didn’t have a location marker, but it resonated with other forms, like Earthworks.” From the outset, Cha’s refusal of fixed coordinates resonated deeply with Green’s evolving concerns.
While Dictée became, for some, the primary portal into Cha’s work, Green’s engagement unfolded across media and across time. In 1997, invited to participate in the Gwangju Biennial, Green created the single-channel video Partially Buried Continued, bringing Cha into dialogue with the land artist Robert Smithson and with slide photographs taken by Green’s father during the Korean War. The work reflects on artistic and familial genealogies, tracing how associations to history, location, and inheritance become entangled in a subjective web where fiction and memory blur.
Partially Buried Continued meditates on the ways photography and remembrance intertwine, and on the difference between memory as an active, unstable process and memorialization as a fixed act. Moving between Korea, Berlin, Ohio, the 1950s, the 1970s, and the 1990s, Green’s film navigates what is near and what is far, what is other and what is self. Cha and Smithson appear as recurring presences — two artists attentive to language, site, and temporality — whose traces persist in the wake of their deaths.
In Green’s filmic meditation, the question is not simply influence, but inheritance: how one invokes the dead, and how their works continue to reverberate across generations. The film expands upon her earlier Partially Buried (1996), revisiting photographs taken during the Korean War by her father, images from Gwangju on May 18, 1980, and her own photographs from Korea in 1997. Through these layered temporalities, Green probes the complexities of national identity, historical violence, and artistic forebears — “indices,” “inscriptions,” fragments that tug insistently at the present.
Seen through Green’s sustained engagement, Cha’s legacy is not static canonization but ongoing activation. If early receptions of Cha moved from the SoHo avant-garde to feminist and Asian American frameworks, Green’s work situates her within a broader constellation of artists grappling with displacement, translation, and the instability of place. Cha’s fascination with language — shaped by her experience as a child emigrating from Korea, where the national language had been banned during Japanese occupation — found expression in writing that treated language as both tool and estrangement. In a 1979 artist statement, she described learning a new language as extending “beyond its basic function of communication,” becoming “a consciously imposed detachment.”
Green’s practice echoes and refracts these concerns without subsuming them. By bringing Cha into conversation with Smithson, with personal archives, and with geopolitical histories, she underscores how artistic genealogies are never singular. They are layered, provisional, and charged with affect. In this sense, Green’s work demonstrates how Cha’s questions — about exile, memory, translation, and the instability of meaning — continue to unfold, not as closed chapters of art history, but as living problems that demand renewed negotiation in the present.
