Theresa Hak Kyung Cha at SF Cinematheque: To See, Empty

I once tried to interview the poet Myung Mi Kim. I contacted her and we agreed that I would email her questions for her to answer. Months passed, and yet I couldn 't think of anything I wanted to ask her. Perhaps I knew her work too well, or not well enough, or perhaps it was another instance of my unfailing unreliability, but I eventually conceded defeat in ever coming up with a question I thought couldn't be answered by just reading her books. In a deeper way, I felt the proper response to a book of poetry should be through underground channels; through more poetry.

I still regret that I could not overcome this instance of dumbness. It seems the work of Korean American poets like Myung Mi Kim and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha often go largely unheard of by those who might understand best their explorations of dislocation or (the impossibility of)cultural identity.

Trying to review Cha's two video works -- vidé o ème and re dis appearing -- plunged me in a familiar inability to speak. Both these works, brief as they are, remind me of a description of the poet's preparatory mood, the liminal stage of muteness before speech. While these works irresistibly call for a response in their own language, here is my best attempt  in the vernacular.

re dis appearing, a three minute video, is striking in its spare and pure imagery: A hand and a bowl of water, accompanied by voices sounding like crystal chords. While I would have to watch the video again to unravel the text, I understood Cha to be enacting a device used in the first part of her book Dictee: illuminating the refraction of a chain of words crossing into the parallel of another language. Multiple speakers recite phrases in French, which are rejoined by "bad" translations in English. This act reminded me of a time when, as a child, I didn't understand idiomatic phrases -- meanings which native English speakers shared -- because I would translate them literally. Perhaps the multiple voices represented the chordal way words are strung together, their overtones always accompanying a leading voice; the slight delay in the voices reminded me of the way tides leave continually decreasing traces as the waves ebb.

vidé o ème is also three minutes long. A simple character generator displays white text, which fades in and out of a black screen. The screen seems like a vast surface of black water, with the velvety quality of early video; it also suggests the opposite of a black ink on white paper, acting as a black "page" with white text. The manifestation of each word particle itself takes on a dramatic quality -- each unit radiating into multiplying connections and meanings. When the characters vidé  o flash, linger and fade on the screen, they refer simultaneously to the medium of video; video -- "I see" in Latin, or the French word vide, meaning "empty."

Next a female voice-over (perhaps Cha's voice?) sounds the words, "to see," syllable by syllable, so slowly that it was difficult at first to recognize which language the word belonged to, or what the word was. The tempo of speaking referred perhaps to slowing down time, or perhaps hesitancy. Then the word "empty" is voiced, illuminating the meaning contained in the previous configuration of vidé o.

The particle ème then appears, which most probably refers to the end of the French word poème, for poem. But the disappearance of the letter "p" introduces an uncertainty. The words vidéo and poème are merged by "o," a single character (was one "o" discarded? does it represent the mouth, or a zero?) which can now stand as an image or symbol of the word vide. We even see "ème" can be broken down further; its sound echoed by the voiceover that says "em (pt) y." The alignment of the words vidéo and ème on the screen suggested a kind of mirroring -- a reference to the strange partnership of word (spoken or written) and image (seen and recalled through thought). This brings the act of speaking to the forefront, imaged as an intersection of two worlds, like the surface of water reflecting an upper and lower world, or in this case, two worlds side by side. The accents over é and è of vidé and ème, in their aspect as sign,  further contribute to the internal mirrorings of the video.

The fade-ins and fade-outs of the text began to seem like breathing itself, the action of a mouth forming a word, or perhaps a visualization of sounds striking the air and dispersing. Was this what it was "to see" what was empty? As the new word Cha fuses together -- "vidéoème," a video poem -- emerges in its component parts, we begin to see the empty spaces between the words as what makes this surplus of meaning possible. The blank, black screen itself -- presumably a lack of image -- becomes an image, perhaps of what is beyond reason, but can be thought of negatively. 

It is remarkable that in Cha's work so much can be condensed into three minutes, and how such a rich conceptual field arises out of such a simple set of elements. Her work moves simultaneously in the directions of expansion and contraction -- whether through the universal and mythological threads of her book Dictee, or the molecular movements of her videos.

For more information on Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, you can visit the electronic archives at Berkeley Art Museum: http://www.bampfa.berkeley.edu.

For more information on the San Francisco Cinematheque: http://www.sfcinematheque.org/index.shtml