eau, ile, pierre

Born in 1951 in Busan, Korea, and emigrating to San Francisco with her family at the age of twelve, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha has been celebrated for her pioneering work often informed by her family’s diasporic past and the historical trauma of her home country. In the 1940s, Cha’s parents were exiled to Manchuria by the Japanese colonial government. They then fled to Busan during the Korean War (1950-1953), and eventually to the United States, where Cha grew up and received a bachelor’s and master’s in comparative literature and art at the University of California, Berkeley.

Manipulation of language is one of the most crucial tools Cha used to explore her identity marked by a series of migration and displacement. Her fluency in Korean, English, and French as well as her deep understanding of various mediums enabled her to experiment with language in her works on paper, performance, sound, video, installation, and more. The deliberately multifaceted quality of her works reflects Cha’s refusal to be categorized.

In this work, eau, ile, pierre—which translates to water, island, stone—is written with ink on joss paper, a traditional Chinese paper typically burned as an offering to deceased ancestors, and a material that was likely available in New York City where she lived. The work precedes her magnum opus, Dictee (1982), a genre-bending work published a week before she was raped and murdered at the age of thirty-one. Despite her short career, Cha’s work continues to have an enduring impact on artists and writers today.