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. Photograph by James Cha / Courtesy the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum / Pacific Film Archive

Dictee sparknotes