One expects her to be beautiful.[1] Seventeen-year-old Theresa Hak Kyung Cha appears in a photograph from her high school years. She stands among a group of girls dressed alike in white, each holding a bouquet, arranged for an occasion designed to be seen. Slightly off-center to the left, Theresa’s smile meets the camera. Her long black hair falls straight past her shoulders, and her dress is soft, with short puffed sleeves. Her beauty, if that is the word, arrives already framed by expectation. Taken during her final year at the Convent of the Sacred Heart in San Francisco, where she studied from 1965 to 1969, after her family’s arrival from Korea and a year spent in Hawai‘i, the image marks the close of that time.[2] It captures a senior tea party held in anticipation of the gaze that awaits.
This arranged beauty stands apart from the beauty she would later pursue as an artist. Theresa would learn to unsettle its terms. As such, the senior tea party photograph remains outside her works and outside this essay. If we follow Theresa instead through Exilée and Temps Morts (2009, 2022), we encounter a different trace of those years.[3] Created as a class project (1977–78) during her time at the University of California, Berkeley, the photo-essay includes five photographs taken at Sacred Heart, each paired with a brief reflective note.
Here, no figures appear. Not even Theresa enters the frame. As she describes, the work holds “the presence of the actual events and the actual places in the image, with the exception of the subject.”[4] Turning the pages, light and shadow move through the chapel. They settle on desks and chairs, the Sacred Heart statue above a chalkboard marked with white chalk, the curve of a stairway railing. In this absence, the expectations that once framed her image loosen, allowing a different orientation and meaning to take shape through space itself.
What shapes this space is her present voice. Theresa’s short lines of text sit beside each photograph. Together, the light, the chalk, and the worn floor form a quiet memory trace. Human presence registers only faintly, like a “muffled cough.”[5] As the sequence continues, memory gives way to order. On the next page, beginning with the line “the rigid obsessive order,” the work turns toward discipline: measured skirt lengths, white gloves, synchronized gestures.[6] Through the pairing of image and text, her memory shows how the school’s order entered the body and instructed it.
With more time, Theresa comes to critical language for the forces that shaped the moment of senior tea. Her training in structural film analysis at UC Berkeley and her study of psychoanalytic accounts of spectatorship reframed the gaze as an effect of apparatus and conditioning rather than individual intention. This engagement gave her a vocabulary for understanding how such conditions shape consciousness.
In her letters, now held at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA), this language moves beyond theory, taking shape as a way she gives her sense of self to others. In 1980 she writes to Reese Williams, her dear friend and trusted collaborator, and psychoanalytic language surfaces in her thinking as she shares her senior tea photograph. In this correspondence, the image comes into view with a new distance, legible through the conditions she names as “Americanization.” Held as memory, the photograph also emerges as an early site of self-making, where assimilation appears not as a completed process but as a rupture inherited from her parents’ generation, whose “future side effects” become perceptible in her own life.[7]
Such side effects continue to appear in what she reads, drawing her toward other accounts of consciousness formed under constraint. When she picks up Richard Wright’s Black Boy (1945), she copies passages from the book onto a loose-leaf page for her sister, Elizabeth, another Sacred Heart graduate, summarizing the emerging consciousness Wright traces.[8] What draws her in are the narrator’s psychoanalytic self-reflections.[9] She begins with his description of feeling “wrong” at twelve within a household ruled by strict religious and moral expectations (“…always seemed / to be wrong, somehow, as far as my / family was concerned”).[10] This moment places her at an early point in Wright’s developing sense of self, a trajectory that unfolds through the later chapters and leads to his move from the Jim Crow South to Chicago.
The following passage she copies turns to Wright at fifteen, reflecting on the “yearning for a kind of consciousness” that takes shape in response to his grandmother’s anger and his friends’ silence after he publishes his first story, “The Voodoo of Hell’s Half-Acre” (1924).[11] In this passage, consciousness emerges as a nascent desire, shaped through resistance to the prohibitions imposed by his Seventh-day Adventist grandmother. It unfolds within a broader educational system organized by racial hierarchy, marking a crucial stage in his becoming. Placed in Theresa’s letter-note, Wright’s words widen the questions she is already asking about how North American structures determine the forms a person can take and the limits placed upon them. They gesture toward a system that long predates her and has only become more intricate in her own time.
She carries these questions as she moves into an engagement with the mass-media systems of her own time. This engagement comes to guide her work as a video artist, writer, and film theorist.[12] She explores how images and narratives circulate, and how repeated exposure shapes public consciousness, creating cultural “side effects” that appear gradually. Where Wright’s insight marked an earlier moment in the 1920s, Theresa takes up the question in her own contemporary way during the late 1970s and early 1980s, working through the media forms that ground her practice. She brings these questions into her classrooms, inviting students to consider how the mass-media apparatus shapes perception and how viewers, as part of that apparatus, participate in its codes.
For example, in her 1982 lecture at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (NSCAD), she extends this inquiry by analyzing how media technologies, especially television, train perception through repetition and familiar emotional cues, creating patterned responses in the viewer.[13] These patterns, she suggests, already circulate beyond North American audiences. She traces their reach to Japan, where mass culture often takes up European and U.S. models, and where ready-made modes of behavior and expression appear first in fictional images before entering everyday life. By this moment, such “side effects,” once bound to specific contexts such as the Jim Crow South or Korea during Japanese occupation, have taken on a global scale.
The visual materials Theresa prepared for this lecture include a poster for Tokio Joe (1949), which registers these media effects with particular clarity. Produced for an American film noir set in postwar Japan, the poster had already circulated globally by the time of Theresa’s lecture, more than three decades after the war, shaping the perceptions of audiences folded into the circuits of mass publicity.
In the poster, Tokyo appears not as a lived world but as an unstable, overheated, and faintly dangerous atmosphere. Stripped of specificity, the city becomes a field of burning red haze, where faint architectural traces read less as place than as symbolic scenery. The darkened, compressed crowd at the bottom likewise registers as mood. Layered over this terrain, the enlarged face of the male protagonist (Humphrey Bogart) dominates the composition. His scale and placement frame him as a figure of white masculinity, morally burdened yet upright, an American man whose authority holds steady amid instability. Offset to the upper left, the female lead (Florence Marly) appears at a smaller scale, defined less by agency than by erotic tension and intrigue, and positioned as white Hollywood femininity in visual counterpoint.
As these images circulate through everyday visual experience, they cease to register as constructed and become naturalized and repeatable, increasingly difficult to distinguish from reality itself. In the process, they produce cultural “side effects” that extend beyond their original moment, carrying inherited structures of feeling into new contexts, where they are often absorbed with heightened impact by audiences positioned furthest from the image’s target audience, the white, middle-class male viewer for whom these representations were originally designed.
Around this time, amid her growing attention to mechanically reproduced mass-media images, Theresa was completing DICTEE (1982), the artist book that would later become her most widely known work. The lecture offers a glimpse of the shared urgencies shaping both her teaching and her art practice. DICTEE, however, was only one form these concerns took among the many works she was developing alongside it. These concerns continue in White Dust from Mongolia (1980–82), her unfinished film and novel, where she turns to “amnesia” as a metaphor for structural forgetting. White Dust’s film synopsis centers on an anonymous woman (“Narrative I”) who has lost her memory and her capacity for language, focusing on the inner space of her mind as a site shaped by amnesia.[14] Read alongside her reflections on assimilation, media conditioning, and “future side effects,” this figure emerges as the starkest embodiment of enforced forgetting, a subject whose history has been thinned to the edge of consciousness.
The Statement of Plans for White Dust, drafted as the novel’s blueprint, extends this trajectory by explicitly linking the protagonist’s erasure to Theresa’s critique of North American media and their persistent (non)representation of Korean women.[15] She notes that in the early 1980s North America, contemporary Korea was largely absent from the media landscape, surfacing primarily through residual images of the 1950–53 war, especially when set against the constant circulation of Vietnam. The version of Korea that circulated bore little resemblance to the one she knew, and even less to the one her mother carried, shaping the “future side effects” she understood as accumulating across generations. This pattern of public misrecognition takes form in an anonymous woman, whose history has been displaced to the point of near erasure. Her condition echoes the unnamed women in DICTEE, who fugitively navigate linguistic, national, and institutional frameworks.
In this sense, White Dust emerges as the project through which Theresa turns this pattern of erasure into a question of how forgotten stories might be approached otherwise. Through its layered amnesia, this unfinished work experiments with ways of engaging accounts that have slipped from collective consciousness without being folded back into the media systems that produced their disappearance. As she writes of seeking “to reveal all the elements that are historical to lessen the physical geographical distances as well as the psychological distance of Asian people from other ethnic cultures,” White Dust attempts to stage relation as an ongoing practice, one that holds historical proximity and distance together while attending to lived experience and the presence of a living audience.[16]
More than forty years after her writing, it is difficult to say that the psychological distance Theresa named has lessened, or that Asian people now stand any closer to other ethnic cultures in the ways she hoped for. If anything, the “side effects” she traced have only multiplied, appearing in forms that are sometimes harder to recognize. Her archive shows that she continued to work against that distance, moving with intuition in the early 1980s and trying to share the beauty she found in her practice. She approached this through her own body—not the one shaped for the gaze, but the one that gathered its voice from within. From there, she searched for a way of seeing that could burst out from that interior place, a beauty grounded in her own terms.
Acknowledgments
The author thanks Sampson Starkweather at Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative for his support over the years of archival research, and Tausif Noort at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive for his assistance in making this work accessible. With lasting gratitude to Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, who shares what arose from within.
Notes:
[1] Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, DICTEE (Tanam Press, 1982), 98.
[2] Constance Lewallen, Lawrence Rinder, and Trinh T. Minh-ha, The Dream of the Audience: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (1951–1982) (Berkeley: University of California, Berkeley Art Museum, 2001), 151.
[3] Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Exilée and Temps Morts: Selected Works, ed. Constance M. Lewallen (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2022), 91–111.
[4] Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Art Practice – Untitled (“Intro to Photo Essay”): Outline and Notes, c. 1977–1978, Gift of the Theresa Hak Kyung Cha Memorial Foundation, University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive.
[5] Cha, Exilée and Temps Morts, 102.
[6] Cha, Exilée and Temps Morts, 106.
[7] Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Letters from Theresa Hak Kyung Cha to Reese Williams, Gift of Reese Williams, University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive.
[8] Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Untitled (“To Older Sister Hak-Hee”), Gift of the Theresa Hak Kyung Cha Memorial Foundation, University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive.
[9] Wright’s interest in psychoanalysis grew throughout the early 1940s within his New York intellectual circles and deepened through his friendship with psychiatrist Frederic Wertham, whose influence helped shape Wright’s later role in founding the Lafargue Clinic in Harlem (1946).
[10] Quoted here as it appears in Theresa’s note to Elizabeth (“To Older Sister Hak-Hee”). The source passage is in Richard Wright’s Black Boy, Chapter 5: “Finding no answer, I told myself that I was a fool to worry about it, that no matter what I did I would be wrong somehow as far as my family was concerned” (Harper and Brothers, 1945), 125.
[11] Richard Wright, Black Boy: A Record of Childhood and Youth (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1945), 144–46.
[12] News from the Front, Feminist Collective, NSCAD, p. 9, accessed at NSCAD Digital Repository, https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14663/1615.
[13] Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Instruction (“Nova Scotia College of Art and Design Lecture Notes”) (1982), Gift of the Theresa Hak Kyung Cha Memorial Foundation, University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive.
[14] Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, White Dust from Mongolia film synopsis, Gift of the Theresa Hak Kyung Cha Memorial Foundation, University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive.
[15] Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, White Dust from Mongolia Statement of Plans for Novel, Gift of the Theresa Hak Kyung Cha Memorial Foundation, University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive.
[16] Cha, White Dust from Mongolia Statement of Plans for Novel.