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 Offeringssituates 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.