BAMPFA to Stage Theresa Hak Kyung Cha Retrospective in 2026

The Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive in California will present a retrospective for the late artist and writer Theresa Hak Kyung Cha next year, making it the first show of its kind in two decades.

The exhibition, titled “Multiple Offerings” and on view from January to April 2026, will be the largest to date dedicated to Cha, who died in 1982 at age 31. The exhibition will then go on a national and international tour, with venues to be announced later this year.

BAMPFA has been the home to much of Cha’s art and archives for over three decades. The forthcoming exhibition will feature many previously unseen works alongside her well-known pieces.

“Cha is a fairly elusive artist for many people,” BAMPFA senior curator Victoria Sung, who is organizing the show with curatorial associate Tausif Noor, told ARTnews in an interview. “She’s an artist who defies easy categorization.”

Cha is widely known for Dictee, her 1982 book that blends poetry, memoir, and other formats. Published just before her murder, Dictee has long been more widely known that Cha’s art. Sung said the “hybridity” of Dictee is a model for understanding Cha’s practice as a whole, with the retrospective aiming to “expand it to the entirety of the practice.”

“She was making ceramics, fiber art, photography, video, performance, text-based art—you name it,” Sung said. “People have rarely had a chance to see more than a handful of her works at one time, so that was a big motivation for doing a retrospective, where we could pull out the bulk of what we have at BAMPFA in terms of her art and archives, and show kind of the fullness of our practice, the interdisciplinarity of her practice.”

Sung said that presenting the whole of her practice remains a challenge. “I knew she was elusive, and I knew her work was elusive,” she noted. “But even as I was going through the archives and looking at each of the works one by one, it still is difficult to categorize. By that I mean that even today, when we’re much more comfortable with interdisciplinarity, when Cha was making work in the ’70s and early ’80s, she really didn’t fit into a neat category.”

The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalog, edited by Sung and featuring essays by Julia Bryan-Wilson, Jordan Carter, Danielle A. Jackson, Mia Kang, and Mason Leaver-Yap. In addition to serving as a record of the retrospective, the catalog will include documentation of Cha’s archive, including materials that aren’t being exhibited. The catalog will also feature additional short texts focused on different themes and facets of Cha, allowing readers to “dip in and out of the book as you might with an archive,” Sung said.

Sung, who joined the museum in 2023, had proposed a Cha retrospective during her interview process. “For me, BAMPFA has been synonymous with Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, given how extensive its holdings are of her art and archives,” she said. “I knew that BAMPFA, and really only BAMPFA, could mount to retrospective for this reason.”  

That intention struck BAMPFA executive director Julie Rodrigues Widholm, who joined the museum in 2020 with the intention of focusing the museum on mounting “the shows that only we could do—right now,” she told ARTnews. “Theresa Hak Kyung Cha is clearly an area of strength in our collection, and the exhibition was something that no other museum could do the way that we can do it. It also felt like time to revisit the work.”

Sung said she feels Cha’s work is long overdue for another retrospective, the last being organized by BAMPFA in 2001. “Since that time, an entirely new generation of artists and researchers have found their way to her work,” she said. “She’s one of those artists, who has been either directly referenced or obliquely referenced by so many artists in a way that I haven’t seen to a similar extent.”

Renée Green created works in the late ’90s looking at Cha, while more recently artists like Na Mira and Cici Wu have both made film-based installation works that aim to bring Cha’s memory into the present. All three artists’ work will feature in the upcoming BAMPFA retrospective in a section looking at the artist’s influence. BAMPFA said that over 75 percent of the research requests it receives overall are related to Cha’s archive and artworks it owns, which her family donated to the museum in 1992, two years after it mounted the late artist’s first solo exhibition and a decade after her death.

“When I found that out,” Sung said, “I just understood how much desire there is to learn more about this artist, particularly among younger generations of Asian diasporic artists, so in some ways, you could say that artists, in part, led me to organize the retrospective.”

More recently, her work has received wider attention after years of it not being seen. In 2022, an installation dedicated to Cha’s multidisciplinary work was prominently featured in that year’s Whitney Biennial, and the Hessel Museum of Art at CCS Bard mounted a survey of Cha as part of its “Interference” program, for graduate thesis exhibitions. Then, in 2023, her work was included in the 12th Seoul Mediacity Biennale at the Seoul Museum of Art.

Cathy Park Hong’s 2021 book Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning, which has a chapter dedicated to Cha, also brought renewed attention to the artist. In the book, Hong writes, “Cha treats language as both the wound and the instrument that wounds; hers is a language that conceals rather than reveals identity. In her art projects, she regards words, whether in English or French or Korean, as textural objects, rigid as a rubber stamp, arcane as a stone engraving, not as part of her, but apart from her.”

In an email to ARTnews, Hong added, “Theresa Hak Kyung Cha has been underrecognized both in the art and literary community for decades. It’s only now that her groundbreaking interdisciplinary work is getting worldwide recognition. But it’s especially poignant that BAMPFA is doing the solo show. Berkeley was Cha’s intellectual home. This was where she came of age as a poet and artist so it’s extraordinary that they’re mounting this solo show for her.”

Cha immigrated to the US from South Korea in 1964 with her family, settling in the Bay Area, where she was deeply influence by the counterculture and avant-garde scenes active at the time. She attended the University of California, Berkeley, which houses BAMPFA, from 1969 to 1978, where she earned two bachelor’s degrees (in comparative literature and art) and two master’s degrees (an MA and MFA in art). She also worked at BAMPFA (then known as the University Art Museum) as an art handler and film usher.  

What distinguishes the 2026 show from BAMPFA’s 2001 one was the former’s focus on including “finished” artworks by Cha. “After going through the archives,” Sung said, “what we realized was that this notion of completeness is an almost arbitrary designation when it comes to an artist like Cha because she was constantly iterating on her artworks across mediums. I hope that the exhibition will emphasize the fluidity of our practice in that way.”