BERKELEY, CA.- On January 24, the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) opens Theresa Hak Kyung Cha: Multiple Offerings, the largest exhibition to date on Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (1951–1982), marking the first time in 25 years that this influential artist will be the subject of a major retrospective. Featuring more than one hundred objects and ephemera drawn primarily from BAMPFA’s collection and archives, the exhibition spans the full breadth of Cha’s multifaceted career across conceptual art, film, performance, and text-based media. Multiple Offerings presents aspects of the artist’s practice that have never been publicly displayed—including early experiments in ceramics and fiber—and highlights Cha’s critical explorations into language, memory, and diasporic identity. Underscoring her ongoing influence, the exhibition situates Cha within a constellation of artworks by her contemporaries and peers, as well as those by artists working today who have contributed to her lasting legacy.

Born in Busan, South Korea in 1951, Cha immigrated with her family to the Bay Area in 1964 and was deeply influenced by the avant-garde currents that were reshaping the region’s art scene. As a student at UC Berkeley between 1969 and 1978, where she received undergraduate and graduate degrees in art practice and comparative literature, Cha worked as an art handler and film usher at the University Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (as BAMPFA was then known). Since 1992, BAMPFA has been home to the Cha Collection and Archives, which were generously donated to the museum by the Theresa Hak Kyung Cha Memorial Foundation in the wake of her untimely death. These materials have served as an invaluable resource that has helped catalyze artistic, curatorial, and scholarly attention on Cha’s visionary practice, constituting over 75 percent of the museum’s research requests in recent years.

Best known for her groundbreaking 1982 publication Dictée, a hybrid novel-poem that collages image and text, Cha worked across different media to explore cultural and linguistic displacement and their attendant effects. She was keenly attuned to the active role that audiences play in the creation of meaning and prioritized non-linear narratives to allow for more open-ended forms of interpretation—what she termed a method of “Multiple Telling with Multiple Offering.” The retrospective adopts this framework to allow for a range of entry points into Cha’s work, guiding visitors through the themes—memory, exile, and the mutability of language, among others—that recur throughout her oeuvre.

In addition to presenting the full scope of her practice, Multiple Offerings situates Cha within a dynamic group of artistic voices, tracing the exchanges that shaped her work and highlighting her influence on subsequent generations of artists. Works by Jim Melchert, Terry Fox, Reese Williams, and Cecilia Vicuña evoke the collaborative environment in which Cha developed her practice, while works by Renée Green, Yong Soon Min, L. Franklin Gilliam, Na Mira, Jesse Chun, and Cici Wu illuminate her lasting impact. Seen together, the works in the exhibition foreground the rigorous experimentation and radical generosity of a practice that continues to reverberate among new generations of artists and audiences.

In conjunction with the retrospective, BAMPFA has published a richly illustrated catalogue—the first museum monograph dedicated to the artist in over twenty years—featuring comprehensive documentation of Cha’s art and archives. Edited and with an introductory essay by Victoria Sung, the volume includes essays by Julia Bryan-Wilson, Jordan Carter, Danielle A. Jackson, Mason Leaver-Yap, and Tausif Noor, as well as a roundtable discussion with artists Na Mira and Cici Wu, moderated by Min Sun Jeon.

“Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s radically interdisciplinary practice defies easy categorization,” said Victoria Sung, BAMPFA’s Phyllis C. Wattis Senior Curator, who curated the exhibition. “Through this retrospective we hope to show the full complexity of her oeuvre and open up the Cha Collection and Archives to future generations of artists and researchers.”

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha: Multiple Offerings will extend and deepen a growing public understanding of Cha’s contributions following her inclusion in recent international exhibitions such as the 2023 Seoul Mediacity Biennale and the 2022 Whitney Biennial. The exhibition’s debut in Berkeley will be followed by a national and international tour, with additional venues to be announced this spring.

“With this exhibition, we are excited to raise awareness of Cha’s work and cement her place in the history of art from UC Berkeley, the Bay Area, and beyond,” said Julie Rodrigues Widholm, BAMPFA’s Executive Director. “Cha's rigorous examination of how identity is shaped by place, language, and form continues to resonate across generations and disciplines.”

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha: Multiple Offerings will be accompanied by a robust series of public programs, including:

시( )nawi( )fugue (an improvisation, an offering, a reading)
January 24, 2026 2pm

Artist Jesse Chun presents the inaugural activation of her new performance series 시( )nawi( )fugue. A collective​, improvisational reading​ of her drawing installation, 시: concrete poem, stanza (for all the uninherited and inherited time travelers that hum through the slivers), on view in the exhibition, the performance invokes artistic matriarchs and cultivates spiritual kinship across generations through an engagement with sound, music, open translation, and spoken word.