Text, Context, Feeling - Reorienting Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Works

This talk reconsiders Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s practice by exploring the resonance between text, context, and feeling. Scholarship has often focused on her text-based literary work, such as Dictée, situating it either within postmodern avant-garde practice or, conversely, within identity- and nationality-based frameworks. This talk seeks to expand literary disciplinary approaches toward a broader horizon of artistic practice, rethinking Cha’s work at the intersection of literary studies and art history. Rather than positioning her practice exclusively within either abstract formalist modes or identity-based readings, I approach her work through the lens of affect and emotion, as one that embraces and entangles text and context, form and meaning, opening possibilities for embodied, sensorial, and affective engagement that incorporates the insights of both while resisting their limitations.Drawing on works such as Markings (1976), Dictée (1982), and Surplus Novel (1980), I examine how Cha’s works link textual form to bodily perception and material presence, all in flux. Her works bring forward the tactile and visual aspect of language as sites where histories of displacement and trauma are reconfigured. Undoing and tracing such bodily affect from the entanglement between language and material, I discuss how her practice yields neither to the theoretical abstraction of the 1970s U.S. avant-garde nor to the contextual fixity of ideologically driven art.Instead, Cha creates fragile but vital relations between forms and stories, non-human media and human subjects. These intimate yet precarious relations produce a culturally and historically sensitive affect that opens new possibilities for aesthetic solidarity and alternative sociality beyond fixed identity categories.

Ina Choi is a Research Scholar in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Cultures at Barnard College, Columbia University. She received her Ph.D. in East Asian Languages and Civilizations from the University of Pennsylvania. Her research focuses on modern and contemporary Asian and Asian diasporic art from transnational and feminist perspectives, examining how artists negotiate the intertwined forces of postcolonial history, gender, and racialization through intermedial and affective practices. Her dissertation, Ephemeral, Visceral: Feeling Through Form(less), explores the work of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and Hung Liu to theorize the relationship between materiality, affect, and historical memory across transpacific modernisms. Ina holds an M.A. in Art History from the University of Pennsylvania and an M.A. in Arts Administration and Policy from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has worked with numerous art institutions in Seoul and New York as a curator and exhibition coordinator, and served as an exhibition assistant for The Shape of Time at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.