Dear reader,
This month I’m sending you more thoughts on Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and—as with last months’s post—you’ll see I can’t help but shift into a musing on ghosts.
I’ve written about Cha before, and when teaching through the prism of art writing I’ve often offered a purely formal analysis of her work. Like Ana Mendieta, there are times when Cha’s biography bears down more potently than others on her practice. Times when the material I’m reading, the artwork I’m viewing or the news I’m hearing beneath the thrumming coffee machine at eight in the morning make me think It cannot not be mentioned. But this sensation never proves static: I have to reckon with it afresh whenever I consider her. (Over the course of two separate lectures given in the same year, it seemed at first that to speak the conditions of her death was a betrayal of a singular artist, and then later that, to omit it, was a betrayal of women—and marginalised bodies—in general.)
In her essay on Cha in Minor Feelings: a reckoning on race and the Asian condition, “A Portrait of the Artist”, Cathy Park Hong writes of the nuances of silence, asking
…where does the silence that neglects her end, and where does the silence that respects her begin? The problem with silence is that it can’t speak up and say why it’s silent. And so silence collects, becomes amplified, takes on a life outside our intentions…
She says, too
Cha’s death saturated my reading of Dictee, gave the book a haunted prophetic aura…
Which is the greater cruelty? The greater cheat?
I think this essay is also the reason I’ve been thinking about Cha more than usual this month, as it begins
On the first truly cold day of Fall, November 5, 1982, thirty-one-year-old artist and poet Theresa Hak Kyung Cha left her job at the textiles department of the Metropolitan Museum.
I often forget the exact date of her death, but this—the first truly cold day. Shiver-prickle where your body wears its meat. The years go by and more and more I’m at ease with the knowledge that I know very little, but I know this feeling: you step onto the street and your hips and thighs tell you the seasons are changing and you’ll be cold, now, the whole way home.
From the gallery, Cha walked northeast.
Today is a day I cannot bear to follow her.
I look, instead, to this photograph—a jolt, because it is in colour.
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