TY - JOUR
AU - Lamm, Kimberly K
AB - Formally austere but dense with sensation and longing, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s single-channel video Mouth to Mouth (1975) is an eight-minute meditation on the significance of language in Korea’s colonial and diasporic history. Composed of three parts that feature English letters, the vowel graphemes of Han’gŭl (the phonetic script of the Korean alphabet), and an image of a mouth moving in and out of visibility, Mouth to Mouth unfolds into an intensely physical reflection on the Korean language as a mother tongue – a language linked to maternal care, the affective experience of home, and the feeling of national belonging – that has lived in the body and the psyche despite imposed silences. Cha’s title suggests the intimate touch that the image of the mouth embodies, but her spare arrangement of text, image, and sound also transmits a sense of distance and alienation.1 A visual poem that proceeds from writing to speech, Mouth to Mouth evokes the desires for belonging that the concept of the mother tongue might encapsulate for a woman who has inherited the losses written into Korean history. At the same time, the video contributes to Cha’s work eroding the fantasy that women symbolise the affective plentitude with which the mother tongue is associated. Mouth to Mouth begins with a loud rush of heavy static and the camera slowly panning across the English-language title of the artwork, ‘mouth to mouth’, which appears in black, lowercase, and sans serif letters (Fig. 1). Cha has placed the title against a grey background and at the center of the screen. The video camera pans slowly across the letters, creating a horizontal line that is slightly jagged and replicates the act of reading. Cha set the letters far apart from each other so there are large spaces of grey between them; these spaces provoke viewers to notice the letters as visual objects to be ‘looked at’, in the words of Robert Smithson.2 Aligned with Conceptual Art’s engagement with language as a subject matter, material, and system, Cha makes seeing a process of reading. After the camera finishes moving across ‘mouth to mouth’, the screen fades to black and the static slowly dissipates into silence.3 Fig. 1 Open in new tabDownload slide Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, still from Mouth to Mouth, 1975, single-channel video with sound, 8 mins. University of California, Berkeley Art Museum / Pacific Film Archives. Fig. 1 Open in new tabDownload slide Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, still from Mouth to Mouth, 1975, single-channel video with sound, 8 mins. University of California, Berkeley Art Museum / Pacific Film Archives. In the next sequence, Cha’s camera pans across eight vowel graphemes of the Korean alphabet: thick black geometric characters composed of one, two, or three rectangular forms arranged in different configurations of verticality and horizontality (Fig. 2). These characters, which have the qualities of woodblocks, are different from the English letters, but Cha creates correspondences between them. These characters also appear in the center of the screen and there are large spaces between them, which foreground their visual compositions. The camera moves horizontally across the characters at the same slow, slightly uneven pace, which begins to evoke, not just the process of reading, but perhaps even a form of writing, with the camera operating figuratively as a pen, pencil, or brush that brings these letters into visibility. The parallels between the two sequences highlight their differences. Except for the lingering traces from the first sequence, static is absent from this arrangement of letters. There is only the barely discernible hum of the camera. Since the noise that accompanied the presentation of ‘mouth to mouth’ was pronounced, the absence of static stands out, and brings listening into the video’s interplay of reading and seeing. Fig. 2 Open in new tabDownload slide Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, still from Mouth to Mouth, 1975, single-channel video with sound, 8 mins. University of California, Berkeley Art Museum / Pacific Film Archives. Fig. 2 Open in new tabDownload slide Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, still from Mouth to Mouth, 1975, single-channel video with sound, 8 mins. University of California, Berkeley Art Museum / Pacific Film Archives. After the second sequence of letters, and to the sounds of static and rushing water, a mouth slowly and sensually emerges into visibility. Mouth to Mouth is now a meditation on the act of speaking. Cha’s camera no longer pans across the images, but remains still, letting the extreme close-up of the mouth come into focus, becoming a physical image of speech as it attaches to the recognisable order of language. The mouth first appears through thick snow and acquires a discernible shape as the static changes from a dark grey to white speckles of light (Fig. 3). The mouth comes into visibility eight times, carefully sculpting itself into eight vowels of the Korean alphabet. After the mouth composes itself into a letter, it disappears behind the dark static, which makes it look as though the mouth is sinking into the center of the screen. Each image of the mouth attests to the desire to experience these vowel sounds as haptic, sensual forms and hold them in the body so they give rise to the voice.4 The slow rhythm of the mouth appearing and disappearing into static is hallucinatory, as though it is a dream image of a voice long forgotten. Fig. 3 Open in new tabDownload slide Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, still from Mouth to Mouth, 1975, single-channel video with sound, 8 mins. University of California, Berkeley Art Museum / Pacific Film Archives. Fig. 3 Open in new tabDownload slide Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, still from Mouth to Mouth, 1975, single-channel video with sound, 8 mins. University of California, Berkeley Art Museum / Pacific Film Archives. Substantiating Michel Chion’s argument that the appearance of the mouth on screen signals the voice becoming present, Mouth to Mouth is a representation of the human voice taking shape as a visible and audible form. Its disappearance into static suggests that this voice has been lost, longed for, and mourned.5 From the English title, to the phonetic script, to the image of the mouth that connects them, Cha’s camera creates a translation that composes the voice into an object of and vehicle for recovery that does not solidify into a fully discernible form. Listening to the static, silence, and the sounds of falling water in the third section of the video, viewers of Mouth to Mouth can hear bird songs filter into the soundscape, which corresponds to the lyrical opening with which the video concludes, even as the image of the voice fades from visibility. Mouth to Mouth is one of Cha’s love letters to the Korean language. Its evocation of intimacy and distance contributes to the impression of being composed far from home, and so asks to be read in relationship to Cha’s own experiences of the Korean diaspora. She was born in Pusan, Korea in 1951, less than a year after the Korean War began. Two years before her birth, her family had fled Seoul under the threat of military force by the advancing armies of North Korea and China. In 1963, when Cha was thirteen, her family left Pusan for Hawaii, where they lived for a year, and then settled in San Francisco, California, part of what Jodi Kim calls the ‘Cold War constitution of Korean migration to the United States’.6 As a student at the University of California at Berkeley, Cha developed an artistic practice intimately linked to her intellectual pursuits. During a period of widespread student protest and intense political upheaval, she studied studio art and performance as well as French literature and film theory, bringing them together to create what Timothy Yu identifies as a form of ‘self-theorizing’ that makes the psychic inheritance of historical events the artwork’s subject.7 Working at the Pacific Film Archives – a venue created to be the U.S. equivalent of the Cinémathèque Française in Paris with a specific focus on the cinema of the Pacific Rim – crystallized Cha’s engagement with avant-garde world cinema, as did her study at the Centre d’Études Américain du Cinema in Paris.8 Even before she completed her MFA in 1978, Cha was developing an internationally recognised body of work. Her book Dictée (1982) puts forth a fully realised vision that composes a set of malleable signs for representing subjective relationships to the Korean diaspora. That she was able to create, in the short span of her life, an oeuvre of such imaginative reach and historical depth makes speculating about what Cha could have created if she had not been murdered in New York City in 1982 a bitter task. Completed the year Cha received her BA in art at Berkeley, Mouth to Mouth is, as I will show, an exploration of video’s medium-specific qualities, but it also reveals a particularly precise and creative understanding of film theory’s engagement with both semiotics and psychoanalysis. The idea that cinema is a language – the premise of the semiotic approach to cinema – is elegantly realised across Cha’s oeuvre. With a tender lyricism that is, for the most part, absent from artists’ engagement with semiotics, Cha’s pieces break down the components of signs (textual, visual, and acoustic) and transforms them into aesthetic materials to evoke the losses of Korean history. She opens the gap between signs and their referents to reveal modes of reading, seeing, and listening capable of attending to those losses. The voice, and all its associations with subjective expression and political representation, is prominent among the signs Cha opens. She does so by representing the voice as Mladen Dolar understands it, as an excess of speech, which entails making the gap between speech and the voice part of its composition.9 The work of Christian Metz, whose essay on the connection between cinematic spectatorship and daydreaming Cha included in her anthology Apparatus: Cinematographic Apparatus: Selected Writings (1980), illuminates how film theory shaped her theoretical and artistic engagement with the voice. Metz tracked the ‘desire for language’ in European cinema, and Cha worked with this concept to represent the desire for the voice of the Korean mother tongue.10 Encompassing speech, language, and the voice, the mother tongue is a phrase dense with figuration. Linked to 'the motherland', it stands for a native and original language infused with the idea of maternal care. The mother of this phrase, which is usually forgotten and unhinged from any referent to actual mothers, represents the sense of familial belonging that speaking in one’s native language can confer. Another word for language, the tongue connects to the physical apparatus of speaking, and suggests a language that arises spontaneously in the mind and moves easily through the mouth. The mother tongue is a dead metaphor that can be disinterred to reveal an important but often unacknowledged form of the reproductive and affective labour assigned to mothers: teaching children to speak, read, and write, but also, in a more diffuse way, shaping the voice to create an affective language of home through which the voices and subjectivities of children take shape.11 The concept of the mother tongue allows this intimate work to transfer to a national scale, and it can name a paradoxical demand that women create feelings of plentitude and belonging – not only for families and kinship systems, but the imaginary cohesion of the nation – through their absence and silence. Mouth to Mouth explores what it means to inherit a mother tongue that has been silenced, but does not rely on the voice as a vehicle for ontological fullness or the assertion of political presence. Rather, Cha writes the voice of the Korean mother tongue so that it moves between presence and absence and thereby reveals how it carries the traces of colonial violence that fracture the voice with loss. My aim in this essay is to read Cha’s artwork as a project devoted to rendering the psychic reverberations of Korean history and an aesthetic meditation on the desire for the voice of the mother tongue. I do this by situating her artwork in relation to the history of Korea in the twentieth century, focusing specifically on the suppression of the Korean language by the Japanese Imperial Regime from 1910 to 1945. Exploring how the subordination of women figures into this insidious form of colonial violence, I argue that Cha writes the mother tongue and reveals it to be a compelling fantasy of a maternal voice that reinforces gender hierarchies and impedes nuanced representations of Korean women’s subjectivities. Working with a concept of writing offered by deconstruction, a practice of representation that carries and partially reveals the traces of what has been repressed, Cha’s expanded understanding of writing is a form of psychoanalytic thinking that evokes the psychic transmission and reception of history. More specifically, I argue that Cha creates a postcolonial feminist iteration of what the post-Freudian psychoanalysts Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok identify as ‘mouth work’. Developed from analysing patients in Europe who inherited the traumatic destruction of the Second World War along generational lines, the concept of mouth work builds on Sigmund Freud’s claim that the melancholic returns to the oral stage of development and seeks to ‘devour’ the lost object.12 Focused on the metaphorical resonances that circle around the mouth – eating, speaking, internalising – mouth work is a reading practice that is scrupulously attentive to the archaeological dimension of words – their sonic textures, etymological parts, and affective resonances – to translate the traumatic histories that patients have ‘swallowed’. In mouth work, accepting loss as both the condition of speech and a material of the voice erodes the fantasy images that screen away the impact of historical damage and loss.13 With a similar understanding of and approach to language, Cha developed an iteration of mouth work to unhinge the image of the Korean woman from the work of symbolising the mother tongue; that is, holding it as a recognisable form through the voice. Cha writes the voice of the Korean mother tongue to render its symbolic instability, not to destroy or repress it, but to break up its fixed place in the unconscious as a fantasy of home, which opens the possibility of imagining a maternal line within Korean history. Writing the Mother Tongue Cha’s portrayal of a lost voice in Mouth to Mouth represents a desire to intimately connect to the Korean language and the role it played in the story of creating and defending a distinct national culture. Linguists agree that until the fifteenth century, Koreans relied upon the Chinese writing system to represent their native tongue.14 However, there are textual vestiges that evidence Koreans ‘recording words in their own language’, which, as scholars argue, ‘must once have been read with the sounds and words of a poem’.15 The significant differences (grammatical and phonological) between Korean and Chinese made the translation difficult for most of the people who spoke it.16 In 1443, Sejong – fourth King of the Chosǒn kingdom and a linguist – responded to this challenge by developing a script that translates the Korean language into a written system.17 Sejong called the alphabet Hunmin chǒngŭm, which means, ‘The Right Sounds to Teach the Nation’ or ‘The Correct Sounds for the Instruction of the People’.18 Hunmin chǒngŭm, now Han’gŭl, is based on articulatory phonetics in which the textual forms of the letters were chosen because they represent the shapes the mouth, tongue, teeth, jaw, and throat make when giving voice to the sounds of the Korean alphabet. In the preface to the primer he composed and distributed, King Sejong addressed the Korean people and explained that the ‘sounds of our country’s language … are not smoothly adaptable to those of the Chinese characters’ and as a result, ‘there are many who have something they wish to put into words but are never able to express their feelings’.19 King Sejong’s formulations attest to not only an invention of a writing system, but also the consolidation of the Korean voice – the ‘sounds of our country’s language’– through writing. The Chinese script continued to hold the most prestige, however, and as Hyaeweol Choi explains, the lower status of the Korean script became attached to women and people of the lower classes. Han’gŭl was often called ‘amgūl’, which means female letters.20 Mouth to Mouth not only resonates with the poetic fragments of the Korean language before the invention of the written alphabet, but also connects to the feminised materiality of the voice with which Han’gŭl has been historically associated. In Mouth to Mouth, Han’gŭl is the artwork’s subject, form, and source of feeling. As Lawrence Rinder explains, the video ‘rehearses the very logic of the Korean alphabet’s creation’.21 Indeed, the mouth not only comes into and out of visibility, but forms very specific shapes. The second letter becomes a perfectly round ‘o’ that creates a small circular threshold into darkness (Fig. 4). For the fifth letter, the mouth creates a horizontal shape that reveals a row of teeth as the camera moves across the two sides of the clenched jaw (Fig. 5). While Mouth to Mouth is sensual, even erotic – in a few instances the mouth looks to be forming a kiss – there is a strained precision that Cha brings to the act of forming the shapes of the letters that suggests a struggle to remember and draws attention to the interdependency of the voice and language. Building on Dolar’s definition of the voice as excess, Pamela N. Corey argues that the voice is an ‘emanation that exceeds language but is lost within it’, which helps us see that Mouth to Mouth represents a desire to become lost in the letters of the Korean alphabet.22 The separation of the image and sound is part of revealing that desire. Cha asks viewers to note the difference between the image of the mouth contorting into the shapes of the letters and the ambient field of extra-diegetic sound. Neither sound nor voice issue from the mouth on screen. While enacting the bodily process of remembering the shapes of the Korean vowels, the image of the mouth becomes a citation of a voice that has been silenced. Fig. 4 Open in new tabDownload slide Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, still from Mouth to Mouth, 1975, single-channel video with sound, 8 mins. University of California, Berkeley Art Museum / Pacific Film Archives. Fig. 4 Open in new tabDownload slide Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, still from Mouth to Mouth, 1975, single-channel video with sound, 8 mins. University of California, Berkeley Art Museum / Pacific Film Archives. Fig. 5 Open in new tabDownload slide Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, still from Mouth to Mouth, 1975, single-channel video with sound, 8 mins. University of California, Berkeley Art Museum / Pacific Film Archives. Fig. 5 Open in new tabDownload slide Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, still from Mouth to Mouth, 1975, single-channel video with sound, 8 mins. University of California, Berkeley Art Museum / Pacific Film Archives. By recreating the vowels of the Korean alphabet, Cha is alluding to Korea’s history of contesting the linguistic hegemony of colonial and imperial forces, including the deployment of Japanese, French, and English as tools to bury or break the cohesion of Korean culture.23 Of particular importance for Mouth to Mouth is the effort of the Japanese Imperial Regime to eradicate the Korean language.24 During the first decade of colonial rule, known as the ‘dark period’, but also through the period of wartime colonialism (1931–1945), extreme measures were put into place to exploit language as a system of order that could, it was assumed, ‘forcibly assimilate the Korean people, to remake them in Japanese’.25 Newspapers were banned (or heavily censored and used to identify figures of the resistance), publishing houses were shut down, Korean was forbidden in schools, and people were forced to adopt Japanese names.26 This sustained effort to make the people of Korea recognise themselves through the Japanese language by circumscribing the use of and identification with their native tongue expresses a sadistic fantasy that language can be extricated from a collective voice and the political subjectivity that it configures. Gender hierarchies were part of this large-scale subordination, for it was during the late 1930s and 1940s that Korean girls and women were forced to serve as ‘comfort women’ for the Japanese army.27 Made to contain the sexual aggression promulgated by the masculinist theatre of war, the exploitation of the comfort women – and the erasure of their experiences in the aftermaths of colonial rule – replicated the expectation that women silently contain and carry events that nations refused to confront. Ultimately, the efforts of the Japanese Imperial Regime to eradicate the Korean language as a symbol and source of national culture could not be thoroughly enforced. Mouth to Mouth demonstrates this. The video shows that the voice, which exceeds the ideological order and force of language, ensured its survival. The rhythm of the mouth appearing and disappearing into the center of the screen suggests openings in the voice where colonial dominance was not complete. Cha writes from within those openings, not to find an image of wholeness, but to create a movement between presence and absence that reveals how the image of woman figures into the project of nationalist recovery as the embodiment of the mother tongue. Cha’s writing of the mother tongue is central to the subtle feminist argument moving through her oeuvre. To understand the feminist dimension of Cha’s artwork, it is necessary to place it in relationship to the March First Movement of 1919 (Sam-il Undong) and the role Yu Guan Soon (1904–1920), the sixteen-year-old resistance fighter, played within it. A widespread protest for national independence and self-determination, the March First Movement erupted in over 1,500 demonstrations across the peninsula and faced a punitive military crackdown. A flashpoint in the development of twentieth-century Korean nationalist consciousness, this movement also became a ‘turning point’ for the Women’s Movement in Korea.28 Reflecting the international circulation of feminism in the first decades of the twentieth century, and the intense focus on the Korean New Woman (Sin Yōsōng) – her agency, visibility, education, literacy, and ethics – girls and women played significant roles in the March First Movement. An icon of women’s participation, Yu Guan Soon helped catalyze this protest and died in prison from retaliatory violence.29 She is a symbol of Korean women’s active engagement in anti-colonial resistance and expanded the category of woman beyond what Hyaeweol Choi describes as the ‘Confucian-prescribed gender ethics centering on the filial daughter, faithful wife and sacrificing mother’.30 The anti-colonial feminism for which Yu Guan Soon stands is in tension with the emphasis on the Korean language as the mother tongue, an important outcome of the March First Movement and its efforts to refute colonial hegemony. When the Imperial Regime loosened restrictions on cultural practices, including literature and publishing, the Korean language solidified as a source of national pride and distinction, and its status as a mother tongue was sealed.31 Cohering a national culture through the mother tongue relies upon the idealisation of the maternal that undergirds the gender ethics of Confucian patriarchy. Cha tells the story of Yu Guan Soon in Dictée and, as I will show, makes a photograph of her one of the book’s icons of feminist desire. Her image is part of Cha’s efforts to write the voice of the mother tongue and imagine a maternal line within Korean history. The anti-colonial feminism of Cha’s artwork resonates with the work of postcolonial feminist scholars, as evidenced in the anthology Dangerous Women: Gender and Korean Nationalism (1998). The scholars of Dangerous Women argue that Korean nationalism has been consistently imagined as a timeless and unified whole that asserts the value of masculinity and links it to the capacity to transcend colonial subordination and its implicit link to feminisation. Women, made to embody feminisation, become part of the nationalist project through a patriarchal conception of their reproductive capacities and the assignment to maternal care that regularly follows from that conception. The idea that women are ‘protonationalist womb[s]’ and ‘asexual vessels of fertility’ is premised on their exclusion from the sphere of political action and, more broadly, their silence.32 In dominant nationalist discourse, Korean women have been ‘relegated’, in the words of Elaine H. Kim and Chungmoo Choi, ‘to the status of voiceless auxiliaries’.33 Dangerous Women identifies the dual imperative that Korean women reproduce the nation with their bodies and create the affective ground of national belonging with their silence. The fact that this imperative is so often taken as a given and thus for granted is, by way of a cruel paradox, the outcome of what Luce Irigaray identified in 1977 as women’s exile from language. Drawing from her own work as a practicing psychoanalyst, in ‘Women’s Exile’, Irigaray argues that the claim to a universal language is an instrument of women’s dispossession.34 This is a familiar (and often dismissed) argument of écriture feminine, but worth revisiting in the context of Cha’s writing the voice of the mother tongue. Cha’s work suggests that Korean women’s exile from language is the condition that allows the mother tongue to become a nationalist object. Gayatri Chakrovarty Spivak makes similar claims, and in Nationalism and the Imagination (2010), the mother tongue is a hinge between nationalism and ‘reproductive heteronormativity’, which she defines as the ‘para-reasonable assumption that producing children by male-female coupling gives meaning to any life’.35 As Spivak explains, reproductive normativity is ‘the oldest, biggest sustaining institution in the world, a tacit globalizer’ and key to understanding the subordination of women around the globe.36 Reproductive normativity and nationalism justify each other, according to Spivak, and the mother tongue can be thought of as a song that sutures these two ideological entities together through the sense of belonging associated with home.37 While home and comfort most readily evoke domestic pleasures, the experiences of the ‘comfort women’ reveal the sexual exploitation that underlies these concepts. In her examination of the comfort women’s testimonies and the media reports about them, Hyunah Yang argues that the comfort women demonstrate the ways in which the subordination of women is intimately bound up with keeping the compounded silences of Korean history in place. Though the women’s testimonies created a counter-discourse, Yang argues that they were reincorporated into a ‘nationalist message’ through the discourse of chastity, a form of idealisation that ‘misplac[es]’ the women’s experience as the ‘material and ground for “men’s talk”’.38 A voiceless woman has a purpose. She exists, as Seungsook Moon explains, as the ‘precondition’ of the Korean nation ‘as a community of men’ and is expected to create collective and familial harmony, an affective atmosphere that can satisfy the desire for comfort.39 The sensuality with which Cha renders the desire for the voice of the mother tongue in Mouth to Mouth indicates her attention to this expectation. In other words, Cha examines and explores the affects women give to others with their voices. She makes the voice a medium for imagining the conditions in which Korean women could represent themselves as something other than ‘voiceless auxiliaries’ without insisting on their full vocal presence. By prying the affects linked to maternal care away from gender subordination, Cha reveals the expectation that the mother tongue symbolises and harmoniously brings together structures of belonging. She transforms this expectation into an acoustic ‘frame of beholding’ her artwork lovingly evokes.40 While there is no doubt that women perform the work of cohering feelings of belonging, what Kaja Silverman calls the ‘fantasy of the maternal voice’ animates the assignment to harmonise. Silverman argues that at the center of this fantasy is the ‘acoustic mirror’, a sustaining reflection provided by ‘the environment or sphere of the mother’s voice’.41 This ‘acoustic mirror’ emerges from the material conditions of childcare and the fact that the mother is most often the ‘first language teacher, commentator, and storyteller – the one who organizes the world linguistically for the child’.42 It also comes from the demand to cover over the absence, damage, and vulnerability (figured within psychoanalysis as castration) the woman’s body has been made to represent. As Silverman explains, the fantasy of the maternal voice appears in cinema as a seamless alignment of voice and image that relegates women to the interior spaces of the cinematic frame, an interiority often represented through images of the mouth.43 Cha’s work suggests that coloniality deepens and complicates the fantasy of the maternal voice, as the poles of denigration (which comes from forced subordination) and idealisation (which often animates gestures of resistance and recovery) become the frame for a national history. By perpetually interrupting any alignment of voice, text, and image – the primary strategy of her artwork – Cha disinters the fantasy of the maternal voice in the desire for the voice of the Korean mother tongue by writing within its gaps and absences. If we think of the voice as Dolar asks us to – as an excess without a discernible source, origin, or cause – then the mother tongue could stand for the work women do giving the voice an origin, covering over the fact that it emerges from, as Dolar puts it, ‘a space of a breach, a missing link, a gap in the causal nexus’.44 Needless to say, the layers of colonial violence inflicted upon Korea after the conclusion of the Chosǒn dynasty (the battle for the peninsula among Imperial Powers that began in the late nineteenth century, the colonisation of Korea in the first half of the twentieth, and the subsequent splitting of the country along the 38th parallel during the Korean War) would certainly provoke the desire to speak in the voice of the mother tongue and have one’s subjectivity safely mirrored and contained there, without breaks or missing parts.45 And yet, if an idealised and naturalised connection between women and the mother tongue informs an insistence that this desire for the voice of home will be satisfied, patriarchal authority over women reasserts itself. That is, the assumption that women embody the mother tongue (and the feelings of belonging that the figure encapsulates) reinforces a collective reliance on ‘woman’ as a sign: a representation that purports to represent all women but actually reflects a narrow concept of woman that serves masculine dominance and erases the singularity of women’s subjectivities.46 This sign is an expression of women’s status as objects of property that not only belong to men but can be ‘exchanged’ (actually and symbolically) to consolidate masculinist bonds or assert power over the men of a subordinate nation.47 Cha interrupts the place of the mother tongue in the symbolic exchange of women. She represents the desire for the frame of beholding that the mother tongue confers, but rather than satisfying that desire, writes to reveal how it relies on a fantasy of a maternal voice that promises to make one whole. This promise, Cha’s work helps to reveal, is actually premised on women’s silence, and therefore impedes Korean women from representing their subjective and singular relationships to history. This mouth work manifests the psychoanalytic thinking that is internal to Cha’s oeuvre but is, for the most part, not treated as such by the scholars who read it.48 Her engagement with the particular qualities of video, however, makes the psychoanalytic dimensions of her artwork quite clear. Video’s Empty Mirror Mouth to Mouth is about the desire to speak in the voice of the mother tongue, but also see oneself within its grammar of psychic coherence. The video’s layering of texts, sounds, and images suggests that the mother tongue is more than a language thick with the affects that congeal around the concept of home, but a constellation of images and a set of visual experiences that create a frame of beholding that mirrors back an image of the self as an object that belongs to it. Many of Cha’s formal choices in Mouth to Mouth evoke a mirror: the doubled words of the title, the close-up of the mouth, and the hazy grey static speckled with light. Cha’s attention to mirroring in Mouth to Mouth corresponds with Rosalind Krauss’ argument that narcissism is the medium of video. In her 1977 essay ‘Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism’, Krauss looks at the videos Vito Acconci, Lynda Benglis, Joan Jonas, and Peter Campus produced in the late sixties and seventies, work that Cha also very likely saw. For Krauss, this constellation of videos encapsulates the narcissistic structure of the medium: like a mirror, the video projector immediately creates the image of the person looking into the camera. While this projection creates a fusion of image and self, it also projects a displaced self that ‘transform[s]’, as Krauss explains, ‘the performer’s subjectivity into another, mirror, object’.49 In this scenario, the ‘human psyche’ becomes the ‘conduit’ for the artwork and the video enacts a process fundamental to narcissism: incorporating the self as an object of love.50 As Krauss reveals, video artists of the sixties and seventies did more than replicate this act of incorporation; they challenged the idealised self-image that it creates and the feedback loop upon which it relies. For Krauss, video artists’ play with the projected image is akin to the psychoanalytic project in which the patient ‘break[s] the hold of [her] fascination with the mirror’, which she describes as ‘disengage[ing] from the “statue” of [her] reflected self’. 51 This disengagement from the ego’s ‘statue’ allows the ‘real time of [the patient’s] own history’ to be rediscovered, an outcome of psychoanalysis that is pertinent to Cha’s work rendering the psychic reverberations of Korean history against the fantasy image of the mother tongue.52 A form of ‘working-through’ in the psychoanalytic sense of the term – identifying repressed experiences and buried feelings so they no longer keep the patient in the ‘frozen’ time of pathological memories – the interruption of fascinated looking staged by video opens a gap in the ego’s narcissistic structure that allows the difference between the self and the fantasy of its wholeness to come into view.53 Krauss does not bring these insights to bear on the work of women artists such as Martha Rosler, Eleanor Antin, and Valie Export (among many others) who enthusiastically took up video to pry apart women’s subjectivities from the work of serving as a conduit for the narcissism of others and discover how to actually perceive and internalise their own images as love objects. When seen through Krauss’ claims, this body of work, which is recognisably feminist in western art history, enriches our understanding of the mirroring Cha restages in her videos and highlights their feminist arguments and effects. As Silverman’s argument about the acoustic mirror shows, mothers and maternal caregivers give children mirrors with their bodies, eyes, and voices; such reflections are the foundation of primary narcissism and allow a child’s subjectivity to take shape. Jacques Lacan’s ‘The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function’ (1977) points to this affective labour that primary narcissism requires, but also illustrates that maternal care is taken for granted. A classic of French psychoanalytic thought that was widely read among artists and filmmakers in the seventies and eighties, in ‘The Mirror Stage’, Lacan argues that mirroring allows the child to see himself as the coherent image that becomes the foundation of the ego and the path to identifying with the ‘I’ in language.54 Feminist readers of Lacan’s text argue that it displaces the care of the mother or maternal caregiver on to anonymous structures of support.55 The mother becomes the precondition of subjectivity, a necessary but unseen ground. Mouth to Mouth reflects a deep understanding of both ‘The Mirror Stage’ and its stakes. It corresponds to Lacan’s theoretical picture of the visual and linguistic material through which the ego is composed, but can also be read as a feminist argument about the displacement of the maternal upon which it relies. By placing the image of the mouth after the English title and Korean characters, Cha enacts a process of going back through her history in the Korean diaspora to find and embody the image of the mother’s mouth sounding out and mirroring back the vowels of the Korean alphabet. But by letting the image of the mouth disappear behind the static, Mouth to Mouth also represents the loss of the mirroring the mother and the mother tongue give, allowing them to become fragmented, partial, and not fully in view. That way, the acoustic mirror of the maternal voice becomes visible and present, but it does not solidify into the invisible yet always present ground through which the statue of the ego is composed. Which is to say that Mouth to Mouth explores the narcissism of video without stabilising it. Instead of collapsing the self into the screen/mirror and forgetting that the image is a projection, Mouth to Mouth sets narcissism ‘adrift’, as Jacques Derrida puts it in his essay ‘Videor’, by moving between presence and absence.56 Cha’s approach to language – as a material dense with affect, layered with historical image-memories, and fissured with the gaps between words and their referents – contributes to this movement. In Vidéoème (1976), Cha creates a dispersal by attending to the etymology of the word ‘video’ and making the definitions that compose the word’s history – in French ‘vide’ means ‘emptiness’, and in Latin ‘videre’ means ‘seeing’ – part of her artwork’s concept and composition, which ‘empties out’ the forms of narcissistic seeing video reflects. In ‘White Spring’, an essay that elegantly charts how Cha’s artwork moves ‘between reverie and resistance’, Trinh T. Minh-Ha describes how Cha’s attention to both the textual and acoustic dimensions of language makes this emptying out possible: ‘Engaging language as simultaneously seen and heard’, Trinh explains, ‘[Cha’s] writing plays up the arbitrary relation between the sound of a word, its visual spelling, its multiple referents, and its foreign mate in translation’.57 Vidéoème begins with a dark grey screen. In the upper right corner, the word ‘VIDÉ’ slowly comes into visibility as white letters against a black background. The frame cuts the ‘O’ in half, which draws attention to the letter as a visual shape. Then, after a pause, viewers see more letters appear from the right – ‘VIDÉ O E’ – which makes it clear that Cha is spelling out the title of her video (Fig. 6). To complete the title, the last letters – 'O ÈME'– appear in the upper left-hand corner (Fig. 7). The last part of the title evokes the word ‘poem’, highlighting that the artwork is, in the words of Susan Best, ‘a video poem about the word itself’.58 Making the screen into a ‘page’ and staging a hypnotically slow unfolding of her title as a visual/textual poem to materialise the process of reading, Cha signals her engagement with the poetry of Stéphane Mallarmé, which along with the work of Paul Verlaine and Charles Baudelaire, became part of the literary resistance to linguistic hegemony in Korea in the early twentieth century. To represent their enforced silence by the Japanese Imperial Regime, Symbolist poets in Korea drew from the French Symbolists’ lost faith in language.59 Trinh suggests that Cha found an affinity with Mallarmé’s poetry because it links silence to a female figure and ‘abounds with images of apparitions and voices of spectral returns, of She who is departed’.60 This spectral and departed ‘She’ suggests the possibility that disappearance is feminised and therefore could also represent the silencing of women within the silencing of Korea and the traces that silencing leaves behind. Fig. 6 Open in new tabDownload slide Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, still from Vidéoème, 1976, single-channel video with sound, 3 mins. University of California, Berkeley Art Museum / Pacific Film Archives. Fig. 6 Open in new tabDownload slide Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, still from Vidéoème, 1976, single-channel video with sound, 3 mins. University of California, Berkeley Art Museum / Pacific Film Archives. Fig. 7 Open in new tabDownload slide Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, still from Vidéoème, 1976, single-channel video with sound, 3 mins. University of California, Berkeley Art Museum / Pacific Film Archives. Fig. 7 Open in new tabDownload slide Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, still from Vidéoème, 1976, single-channel video with sound, 3 mins. University of California, Berkeley Art Museum / Pacific Film Archives. By breaking up the components of the word vidéoème across the square of the screen, Cha highlights the connection between reading and seeing, as she does in Mouth to Mouth. Listening becomes part of this connection, as Cha uses her voice to play with the word ‘vide’ and its etymological associations of emptiness and sight. Vidéoème exemplifies Cha’s proclivity for, as Rinder explains, ‘map[ping] relationships within a single word that crosse[s] among languages, evoke[s] poetic connections, and hint[s] at lost genealogies of meaning’.61 Rinder is pointing to Cha’s archaeological understanding of language, which she creates and accesses through writing. The plaintive depth of Cha’s voice contributes to the unfolding of this linguistic archaeology. Cha states ‘see/empty’ and then ‘to see/emptied’, and the sounds of these words fill the grey screen with her vision and the rough touch of her breath on the microphone inflects the words with physicality. To underscore the relationship between seeing and listening, Cha places the word ‘sound’ at the center of the screen. As ‘sound’ materialises through white letters, she enunciates the word ‘image’, but with a slow hesitancy so it does not completely congeal as an acoustic sign, as if to suggest the process of learning to pronounce the word. By positioning the word ‘sound’ as an image at the center of the screen, and making it a threshold to the sound of the word ‘image’, Cha reveals the blurred imbrications of the senses. The overlap also shows that she works with an archaeological understanding of the image, which, like the image in psychoanalysis, can be, as Griselda Pollock explains, a ‘palimpsest of time and meaning, history, memory, and oblivion’.62 The video then returns to the interplay between ‘see’ and ‘empty’, placing them in an alternating pattern of acoustic and textual representations. Working with the emptiness at the center of video, Cha destabilises the relations among reading, seeing, and listening and shows how they rotate around absences. As a meditation on the desire for the voice of the mother tongue, this emptiness is not an evacuation of the mother but an opening of a space she is not obliged to fill. Cha’s video Re Dis Appearing (1977) also utilises the mirroring of video to empty the voice of the mother tongue. The video begins with the title on the screen: white lowercase letters against a grey background. Like Vidéoème, Re Dis Appearing is an invented word with multiple meanings: the ‘re’ suggests a loop or a doubling, and the return of something that has disappeared, and ‘re dis’ (first person conjugation of the French verb ‘dire’) means ‘re-say’ or ‘re-tell’. The ‘dis’ is also part of ‘dis appearing’ and its connection to loss, but the space between ‘dis’ and ‘appearing’ leaves the possibility of return open. After the title, two hands place a transparent glass bowl of water on a black glass table and against a black background (Fig. 8). A light source outside the frame illuminates the glass bowl, and as the water moves, it creates mirrored reflections. In this video, retelling is a form of mirroring that contains an image of language. The hands holding the clear bowl of water connect to the voice of the mother tongue as a frame of beholding that creates a sense of belonging against the return of disappearance. Fig. 8 Open in new tabDownload slide Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Re Dis Appearing, 1977, single-channel video with sound, 3 mins. University of California, Berkeley Art Museum / Pacific Film Archives. Fig. 8 Open in new tabDownload slide Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Re Dis Appearing, 1977, single-channel video with sound, 3 mins. University of California, Berkeley Art Museum / Pacific Film Archives. This mirroring continues with a soliloquy in which Cha translates English words into their French counterparts: ‘Commence/To Begin’, ‘Already Passed/Déjà’, ‘Mask/Au Camouflage’. Read as though it was a language lesson, the English and French words overlap and echo each other. Cha’s voice hinges them to together, a conduit for both desiring and displacing the idea of an original language. As Anne Anlin Cheng explains, these overlaps create a ‘crisscross effect whereby one cannot tell which language is translating which’.63 Interspersed into Cha’s recitation of this poem of echoes are photographs of unidentified topographies (Fig. 9). One of the photographs depicts small rocks on a beach that have been pulled by the tide and leave traces in the sand. In an artist’s statement from 1978, Cha writes that her work is devoted to ‘the inscription left from the experience of leaving’.64 Re Dis Appearing is thus a meditation on objects on their way to becoming lost, their absences found through an understanding of writing as trace and inscription. Fig. 9 Open in new tabDownload slide Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Re Dis Appearing, 1977, single-channel video with sound, 3 mins. University of California, Berkeley Art Museum / Pacific Film Archives. Fig. 9 Open in new tabDownload slide Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Re Dis Appearing, 1977, single-channel video with sound, 3 mins. University of California, Berkeley Art Museum / Pacific Film Archives. With fragments of visual and textual objects disappearing into fields of grey and black, Mouth to Mouth, Vidéoème, and Re Dis Appearing explore the emptiness of video to destabilise the concept of an original language – one definition of the mother tongue – and the stable arrangement of the senses thought to accompany it. The formal qualities of the videos also resonate with descriptions of the Korean War. Josephine Park writes that the Korean War was created as an American symbol of Cold War assertion and is ‘best known for being forgotten in large part because it was orchestrated to disappear’.65 Responding to David Halberstam’s description of the Korean War as a ‘puzzling, grey, very distant conflict’ that had been ‘orphaned by history’, Jodi Kim points to the impossibilities and paradoxes of this forgetting.66 She writes that ‘every willful forgetting leaves its symptoms and traces, and to label an event a ‘Forgotten War’ particularly inaugurates an attempt to retrieve that which has been forgotten’.67 Cha’s artwork evokes distances and accrues the ‘symptoms and traces’ that resulted from multiple attempts to make the Korean people forget their culture and erase their voice. The silencing of women is part of forgetting the Korean War. The fact that the forces of US hegemony condoned and compounded the repression of the comfort women to make its claim on Korea in the aftermath of WWII is just one example of how women’s subordination figured into making a nation such as Korea an object of exchange in the Cold War mapping of the globe. This exchange reiterated the blatant disregard of its national sovereignty in the Taft-Katsura Memorandum of 1905, which gave the Japanese Imperial Regime ‘free reign’ in Korea for US control over the Philippines.68 As Grace M. Cho makes clear, Korean women have been forced to embody the feminisation of Korea and serve as bodily hinges between ‘militarized sexual violence and imperial domination’.69 Focused on the yanggongju (Western princess)– the Korean woman who, through her relationships to US servicemen, emblematises the surrender to the aggressive sexual appetites of the US military – Cho traces how this figure became an ‘embodiment of the accumulation of often unacknowledged grief’.70 While the yanggongju is defined by the sexual labour Americans extract from her through prostitution and marriage, the fact that she is, in Cho’s words, ‘a shadowy figure hidden in the collective psyche of the Korean diaspora’ suggests that the shame and grief she carries infiltrates the subjectivities of Korean women.71 As Cho explains, the yanggongju has ‘inherited the unspeakable horrors of Japanese colonialism and the Korean War, but even in the silence and shadows she distributes these traumas across the time-space of the diaspora’.72 She is the living trace of compounded forms of colonial violence, which means that subsequent generations, not just those who lived through the Korean War, inherit the effects of the traumatic histories she carries. Since the yanggongju represents a displacement of feminisation on to the female body, the trauma she holds and distributes likely impacts young women with a particularly insidious force. Referring to testimony in Ramsay Liem’s oral history project on the Korean War, Cho writes that children of Korean war survivors have been ‘haunted by silences that take the form of an “unhappy wind,” “a hole” or some other intangible or invisible force’, which ‘reflects the notion that an unresolved trauma is unconsciously passed from one generation to the next’.73 In her artist book Dictée, to which I now turn, Cha makes it clear that the transmission of unresolved trauma along generational lines is precisely what she was working through in her artwork. In Dictée, she creates a form of mouth work that makes the haunted silences and ‘hole[s]’ to which Cho refers openings for representing Korean women’s subjective and singular relationship to their own histories. The Mouth Work of Dictée With an array of texts and images collaged together into a fragmented, irregular composition that evokes the multiple histories that shaped the Korean diaspora, Cha’s Dictée is an intertextual archive that congeals through processes of memory, identification, and longing but at the same time remains open and porous.74 As with her videos, the colonial suppression of the Korean language is central to understanding Dictée; it is a historical event that reverberates through the book and the absent center around which it revolves. The gaps and cuts of Cha’s collage aesthetic allow her to materialise and transform the silence enforced upon Korea and thereby render the voice of the mother tongue as an object fissured with loss and desire. As Mandy Bloomfield argues, ‘Cha presents the ideal of a fullness of being in language as always already lost’.75 Showing that the mother tongue is a lost ideal of ontological fullness in language, and connecting that fantasy to the subordination of women, I have argued that Cha’s artwork can be read as a form of mouth work for the Korean diaspora. By writing her mother’s experience as a young Korean woman made to teach Japanese, Cha’s Dictée reveals its feminist stakes. Abraham and Torok define mouth work as the process of working through traumatic losses that one has inherited from earlier generations. In mouth work, ‘speaking to someone about what we have lost’, there is a reckoning with the fact that death and damage are irrevocable to some degree, and this makes a transformative expansion of subjectivity possible.76 An early acceptance that all of one’s appetites will not be satisfied and that words stand in for lost objects – made possible by the mother’s presence alongside the child’s empty mouth – lays the foundation for this mourning process.77 Explaining how they move their patients from melancholia to mourning, Abraham and Torok follow melancholia’s opaque pathways in generational time, and draw upon Sigmund Freud’s attention to the dream’s dense interplay of words and images (which he describes as a rebus) to develop interpretive methods that enable the process mouth work names. These modes of interpretation are similar to literary analysis, and they describe their work collaboratively unpacking the dead metaphors buried within their patients’ haunted speech as ‘poetics’. While visual perceptions and image memories are part of their literary unraveling, Abraham and Torok argue that idealised images of affective plentitude impede the confrontation with loss. Such fantasy images protect the patient from injury; they help keep lost objects present, psychically entombed as though they are alive.78 The poetics of mouth work erodes such fantasy images and allow patients to identify and mourn the buried losses they have inherited through speech and give rise to the excesses of their voice. This allows people to enter the social life of language and connect with others through what Abraham and Torok identify as a ‘communion of empty mouths’.79 Evoking rituals of hunger and longing, making emptiness into an aesthetic and ethical value, a communion of empty mouths perfectly describes Cha’s work writing the voice of the mother tongue. Dictée reveals how fantasy images can obscure the losses written into Korea’s history, as Abraham and Torok argue, but by creating a collage of texts and images, she also demonstrates how re-presenting images in close proximity to text can be part of seeing and reading the desires that attach to them. In this archive that foregrounds the affective dimensions of its composition, the voice of the mother tongue becomes a textual and visual form that allows the desire for it to become part of its composition. In Dictée, Cha literalises the mother of the mother tongue by making the history of her own mother, Hyung Soon Huo, the book’s central story of exile. This portrayal is key to representing the desire to recover the voice of the mother tongue, but it also shows how the concept impedes Korean women from representing their subjective relationships to history. In the chapter ‘Calliope Epic Poetry’, Cha writes from the position of a daughter and narrates her mother’s history as if to give her back her voice. She tells the story of her mother’s experience as a young Korean woman during wartime colonialism (1931–1945), but uses the present tense to suggest that this history is alive for both mother and daughter in the present: Mother, you are eighteen years old. You were born in Yong Jung, Manchuria and this is where you now live. You are not Chinese. You are Korean. But your family moved here to escape Japanese Occupation… You live in a village where other Koreans live. Same as you. Refugees. Immigrants. Exiles…80 This dense address aims to place the mother in the temporal unfolding of her own history. It continues as Cha writes about her mother’s work as a teacher of Japanese in a village in Manchuria. This scene of arrival illustrates the pervasive demand to internalise colonial power as it manifests in language and hints at the gender hierarchy upon which it relies: You are the first woman teacher to come to this village in six years. A male teacher greets you, he addresses you in Japanese. Japan has already occupied Korea and is attempting the occupation of China. Even in the small village the signs of their presence is felt by the Japanese language that is being spoken … The teachers speak in Japanese to each other. You are Korean. All the teachers are Korean.81 Cha portrays her mother submerged within the language of colonial dominance and implicitly argues that education is an efficient apparatus of colonial power. Identifying the significance of teaching in ‘Calliope Epic Poetry’ and the complicated colonial suppression it illustrates, Lisa Lowe explains that ‘not only is the mother herself “dictated” as a Japanese subject, but in her assigned role as teacher, she is also asked to require dictation, to pass on a legacy of submission’.82 Which is to say that the portrayal of the mother in Dictée represents the forms of silencing at work in the systemic effort to translate Koreans into ‘loyal Japanese subjects’.83 Offering a precise analysis of how Cha undoes this translation, Lowe argues that [b]y renarrating to the mother her mother’s silence during the colonial period, the daughter names and historicizes the loss of Korean language to her mother and to herself, constituting a retrospective mode of address – between postcolonial and colonial subject, between daughter and mother, which interrupts the unilateral dictation of the subject by the colonial state.84 Lowe highlights the multiple subversions at work in Dictée’s ‘retrospective mode of address’, and points to the role writing plays within the reciprocity it creates: ‘The daughter addresses her mother as if the writing itself could reverse the roles of mother and child, as if she might, in turn, attend to her silenced mother by writing for her’.85 Throughout Dictée, writing is intimately tied to the desire to ‘attend to her silenced mother’, as the ‘legacy of submission’ she was forced to internalise extends from the scene of the mother’s work as a teacher and into the transmission of women’s subordination along the maternal line. If the mother is most often the child’s ‘first language teacher, commentator, and storyteller’, to return to Silverman’s formulation, then what does she pass on if her mother tongue has been silenced?86 And what might the transmission of silence mean for the daughter asked to align herself with the mother’s position and the ‘legacy of submission’ with which it is associated? In ‘Calliope Epic Poetry’, Cha writes to give her mother back her voice without sealing it into an idealised object that fulfills the fantasy of the maternal voice at work in the concept of the mother tongue. This allows the daughter to inherit a voice fragmented and fissured with silences but not erased. Portraying her mother’s work as a teacher, Cha represents the force of linguistic hegemony during colonial rule, but it also leads into the chapter’s most poignant scene of desire and resistance: the mother speaking Korean – in secret or in the interior space of subjectivity – despite and because of colonial suppression. With short sentences and fragments to mime the intimate and informal rhythms of speaking to oneself, Cha writes: ‘The tongue that is forbidden is your own mother tongue. You speak in the dark. In the secret. The one that is yours. Your own. You speak very softly, you speak in a whisper. In the dark, in secret. Mother tongue is your refuge. It is being home. Being who you are’.87 Beautifully enacting the belief that speaking in the voice of the mother tongue allows one to become present to oneself, Cha’s rendering of her mother speaking Korean in hiding is a depiction of ontological fullness and a defiant political act. Cha cites the Korean folk song ‘Bong Sun Hwa’ her mother sings and reveals the denial of being written into it: ‘In truth this would be the anthem. The national song forbidden to be sung. Birth less. And orphan. They take from you your tongue’.88 The daughter of this chapter inherits this forbidden song and orphaned tongue, and as ‘Calliope Epic Poetry’ unfolds, it becomes clear that representing the mother’s attachment to the mother tongue becomes a way to represent a daughter’s desires and losses: ‘Mother, I dream you just to be able to see you… Mother, my first sound. The first utter. The first concept’.89 Dreaming to see her mother and the ‘acoustic mirror’ she gave her, Cha makes the mother the unconscious foundation of her subjectivity. And yet, ‘utter’, a word that references itself as a sound and is connected to silence – ‘she did not utter a word’ – creates a gap in that foundation. The awkwardness of the phrase ‘the first utter’ interrupts the expectation to hear ‘the first utterance’ and contrasts with the intellectual sophistication suggested by a ‘concept’. The phrase therefore points to the faltering process of learning to speak, or the difficulty of speaking after a long silence. Such mistakes are deliberate, and can be found throughout Dictée. They break the fantasy of a seamless alignment with the voice of the mother tongue without repressing the desires that fantasy manifests. The passages in which Cha writes her mother’s story enact the reciprocal fulfillment of speaking in the voice of the mother tongue, and she represents her mother’s writing as materialising her voice and the poetry that expands within it: ‘You write. You write you speak voices hidden masked you plant words to the moon you send word through the wind’.90 She connects it to her own project of writing to make her mother’s voice present: ‘I write. I write you. Daily. From here. If I am not writing, I am thinking about writing. I am composing. Recording movements. You are here I raise the voice. Particles bits of sound and noise gathered pick up lint, dust’.91 Written in the present tense, this declaration, ‘[y]ou are here I raise the voice’, represents the arrival of the mother’s vocal presence. An incantatory coming into language that resonates with affect, she becomes audible, visible, tangibly felt, but the ‘particles’ and ‘bits of sound’ also suggest material remainders of another scene. Cha’s continued emphasis on writing as trace erodes this assertion of presence and unhinges the mother from the expectation that she embodies and holds the voice of the mother tongue. Such an expectation often crystallises into icons, but Dictée demonstrates Cha’s expanded, archaeological, and psychoanalytic understanding of images: that they are not exclusive to visuality and can actually be forms of writing that access the layered complexities of subjectivity. While in Abraham and Torok’s conception of mouth work, images function as screens that protect patients from confronting losses that are too painful to accept, the photographs Cha includes in Dictée become part of her commitment to revealing the desires that inform the fantasy of the mother tongue. The chapter ‘Calliope Epic Poetry’ begins and ends with reproductions of black-and-white portrait photographs of Cha’s mother, Hyung Soon Huo: the first as a young woman who looks directly into the camera; in the second as an older woman who looks down and away with what looks like sadness. The photographs are without captions and placed within the page so that they are surrounded by large white margins. They are also printed into the weave of the paper so that they do not stand out as glossy images, but look faded and worn, as if they were photographs enfolded into letters sent from relatives. In one sense, these portrait photographs could be examples of the fantasy images that according to Abraham and Torok screen away loss. (Both the genre of the portrait and the medium of photography are premised on substituting presence for absence.) And yet, the densely written text Cha places between the photographs draws out their indexical qualities, and the black ink of the typography on the white pages can be seen and read as extensions of the black of the photographs. Which is to say that the writing becomes linked to the photographs and the photographs become a kind of writing. The portraits of Hyung Soon Huo are also part of an important sequence of images within the pages of Dictée. In size, shape, quality, and placement on the page, they echo the photograph of the sixteen-year-old resistance fighter Yu Guan Soon as a student at Ewha Girls’ School (Fig. 10), and a close up of the actress Renée Falconetti in a film still from Carl Theodore Dreyer’s La Passion de Jean d’Arc (1927) (Fig. 11). The link between Yu Guan Soon and Falconetti’s cinematic rendition of Joan of Arc is not arbitrary, for Yu Guan Soon was known as Korea’s Joan of Arc. This connection reflects the history of French Catholic missionary activity in Korea, but also the visibility of the New Woman in early twentieth-century Korean culture and politics. As Hyaeweol Choi explains, translations of French stories featuring Joan of Arc aligned with the emphasis on ‘patriotic enlightenment’ (aeguk kaemong), which ‘introduced examples of foreign women who had played patriotic roles in the building of their own nations and served as role models for Korean women to emulate’.92 These photographs are part of a portrait gallery Cha creates across Dictée that represents women’s resistance to the imperative that they carry the subjugation, damage, and vulnerability inflicted upon Korea in its modern history.93 The fact that Cha makes photographs of her mother part of this sequence of portraits shows that Dictée is devoted to imagining a maternal line within Korean history, which is connected to recalibrating what the voice of the mother tongue, and the desire for it, means. The photographs of Cha’s mother become part of this image-repertoire of feminist heroism, but they also temper their iconicity and inflect them with individual vulnerability and subjective singularity. Fig. 10 Open in new tabDownload slide Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Dictée,1982, photograph of Yu Guan Soon. Fig. 10 Open in new tabDownload slide Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Dictée,1982, photograph of Yu Guan Soon. Fig. 11 Open in new tabDownload slide Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Dictée, 1982, film still of Renée Falconetti in Carl Dreyer’s La Passion de Jean d’Arc (1927). Fig. 11 Open in new tabDownload slide Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Dictée, 1982, film still of Renée Falconetti in Carl Dreyer’s La Passion de Jean d’Arc (1927). Without captions, decontextualised, part of what Cheng describes as Dictée’s ‘collage of stranded objects’, Cha brings a rapturous fascination to the photograph of Yu Guan Soon and the still of Falconetti as Joan of Arc.94 Through their spare framing and isolation they suggest the subjective pleasures of holding them in the imagination and identifying with their heroic defiance. It is particularly the close-up of Falconetti, her face at an angle, feeling rising into her skin and through her eyes, her mouth opening so it looks as though it is moving close to the surface of the screen, that highlights both the sensuous pleasures of becoming an image and relinquishing oneself to a higher calling. (Cha was no doubt compelled by Dreyer’s portrayal of Joan of Arc hearing the voices of God and testifying that her mother taught her the Lord’s Prayer.) Though the text to the left of this film still might critique the whiteness of European cinema as a force of homogenisation that dissolves historical specificity – ‘In the whiteness/no distinction her body invariable no dissonance’ – the film still also transfers the affective pleasures Falconetti’s face encapsulates to the photograph of Yu Guan Soon, highlighting her image as much more than a historical document, but also a site of affectively charged identification.95 Personifying proto-feminist resistance to the restraints placed on young women’s political action, the images of Yu Guan Soon and Falconetti could easily harden into idealised icons that restrict these figures to a triumphant martyrdom that denies the actuality of violence and the collective resistance condensed into their iconicity. And yet, by making these images part of Dictée’s intertextual archive that foregrounds fragmentation and erosion, they contribute to materialising the desire for the voice of the mother tongue. Moving among the images and texts of Dictée, it is clear Cha worked with the idea that there is a ‘picture’ embedded within language and utilised it to write the fantasy of the mother tongue and unearth the idealisations condensed into the phrase.96 This writing is evident in the chapter ‘Erato Love Poetry’, in which she screens the mother tongue and makes it into a cinematic image. That is, Cha works with the imagery of cinema to visualise the voice of the mother tongue as an object of desire, which gives it a malleability through which it can be lost and found without fixing it into a stable form. Creating a film script to screen the mother tongue enacts a process of projecting an image that is fractured by loss. To do this, Cha makes the pages of the chapter into cinematic screens and composes a sequence of dense texts in which a woman enters a movie theatre and begins to watch a film. What gets projected on screen is a sensual portrayal of a language lesson:   Mouth Moving. Incessant. Precise. Forms the words   heard. Moves from the mouth to the ear. With the   hand placed across on the other’s lips moving, form- 97 Resonating with Mouth to Mouth, this small passage replicates the effort of shaping one’s speech into a foreign or forgotten language. While the single-word sentences create a staccato rhythm of stuttering and difficulty, Cha also suggests the intimate sensuality that emerges from having the hand of another feel the words as they are shaped through and on the mouth: ‘With the/hand placed across the other’s lips moving, form-’. The fact that Cha screens this scene but breaks it at the word ‘form’ suggests that it will not become whole and complete. Throughout ‘Erato Love Poetry’, Cha utilises the breaks between pages to create montage-like interruptions and connections. This allows her to insert other images and scenarios into the sequence of texts through which she screens the mother tongue, which illuminates the meanings embedded into the concept and the desires projected on to it. What appears on the page that follows the ‘Mouth Moving’ passage is a textual enactment of a film’s opening mise-en-scène that explores the symbolic value of a woman’s beauty – ‘One expects her to be beautiful’ – and the fantasy of a woman one brings to the cinema before even seeing the image of an individual woman on screen.98 Then, on the following page, readers see the ‘ing’ of ‘forming’, and a continuation of the language lesson that began with the phrase ‘Mouths Moving’: ing the words. She forms the words with her mouth as the other utter across from her. She shapes her lips accordingly, gently she blows whos and whys and whats. On verra. O-n. Ver-rah. Verre. Ah. On verra-h. Si. S-i. She hears, we will see.99 The first two lines enact a mirroring in which one speaker mimes the words of another woman speaking ‘across from her’. Cha uses the line break to create a hinge between similarity and difference: the ‘she’ who forms the words and the other who ‘utter[s]’. Deliberately making an agreement mistake, Cha once again uses the word 'utter' to foreground the difficult process of learning a language or remembering it. For Cha, mistakes in speech create gaps that give rise to the voice. As Lowe explains, ‘In recounting her mother’s censoring by the colonial language, the narrator makes use of her own partial fluencies in English and French to revoice that censoring and to forge a new composite voice, a discontinuous voice’.100 Lowe’s formulation draws attention to the fact that Cha is not representing this language lesson in her mother tongue – Korean – but drawing on French and English to create an image of the voice that is not seamless, but ‘discontinuous’ and therefore all the more resonant. Needless to say, Cha’s attention to the speakers shaping the words recalls Mouth to Mouth, and similar to the video, these passages highlight its sensuality, the feeling of the mother tongue in and on mouth: ‘She forms the words with her mouth / … She shapes her lips’. In this communion with another, the speaker blowing ‘whos and whys and / whats’ suggests the telling of a story: perhaps the mother’s life story as it was shaped by Korea’s colonial history, both of which have been buried – through purposeful forgetting by Japan, the USA, and Korea itself. ‘On verra’ – rendered here with a broken and sensual materiality that mimes the act of learning to speak as well as the reparative rhythms of maternal care – translates into English as ‘We will see’. Cha creates an image of speaking the mother tongue but displaces its realisation as a voice into an imaginary future. I began this essay analysing Cha’s video Mouth to Mouth, a moving mirror that reflects the process of finding the mother tongue through embodiment and then allowing it to become lost again. I have argued that this movement between presence and absence is a kind of writing that attends to the material traces of disappearance, but it is also an iteration of mouth work that poetically works through the suppression of the maternal voice in Korean history (Fig. 12). Mouth to Mouth opens spaces that let viewers see how writing the voice of the mother tongue reverberates across Cha’s oeuvre as a particularly anti-colonial and feminist form of mouth work. In fact, Cha’s poetic composition of the language lesson in Dictée is so full of sensation and feeling, while also porous, fragmented, and incomplete, that I am convinced it is a culmination of her work writing the voice of the mother tongue. Cha addresses the mother and gives her access to an intricate, dense, and malleable fantasy of the mother tongue without reducing her to a fantasy image that provides others with a sense of home. Her textual fragments and displacements create a ‘discontinuous voice’, to return to Lowe’s formulation, that points to the singularity of the mother’s subjectivity and thereby resists the assumption that she can be easily put to work for the nationalist project and its lingering promise to make one feel whole.101 Unhinging the desire for that fantasy from a demand for fullness that relies upon the silencing of Korean women, Cha writes the voice of the mother tongue that emerges from a ‘communion of empty mouths’. 102 Fig. 12 Open in new tabDownload slide Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, still from Mouth to Mouth, 1975, single-channel video with sound, 8 mins. University of California, Berkeley Art Museum / Pacific Film Archives. Fig. 12 Open in new tabDownload slide Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, still from Mouth to Mouth, 1975, single-channel video with sound, 8 mins. University of California, Berkeley Art Museum / Pacific Film Archives. Footnotes 1 In a letter to Kristine Stiles, composed upon her first return to Korea in 1980, Cha registered her sense of alienation from ‘my tongue mother tongue’ by writing that it ‘now stands anonymous as strangers / it had to be barren landscape’. Stiles writes that this epistolary ‘description of estrangement’, and Cha's artwork more broadly, ‘exposes the trauma of displacement, the need to learn new languages, and the reality of belonging nowhere’. Kristine Stiles, ‘Performance Art and the Experiential Present: Irregular Ways of Being’, in Alexandra Munroe (ed.), The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia. 1860–1989 (New York: Guggenheim Museum, 2009), p. 335. Many thanks to Professor Stiles for sharing this letter with me. 2 This phrase comes from a press release Smithson wrote for an exhibition of language-based work that took place at the Dwan Gallery in New York City in 1967. Smithson’s full description of the exhibition was ‘Language to be Looked at and/or Things to be Read’, reprinted in Jack Flam (ed.), Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1996), p. 61. 3 On Conceptual Art and language see Peter Osborne, ‘Word and Sign’, in Conceptual Art (London: Phaidon, 2011), pp. 16–51. See also Peter Wollen, ‘Global Conceptualism and North American Conceptual Art’, in Jane Farver (ed.), Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s–1980s, exhibition catalogue, (New York: Queens Museum of Art, 1999), pp. 73–85. 4 Laura U. Marks, The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2000), pp. 141–2. 5 Michel Chion, The Voice in Cinema, ed. and trans. by Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), p. 28. 6 Jodi Kim, ‘The Forgotten War: Korean American’s Conditions of Possibility’, in Ends of Empire: Asian American Culture and the Cold War (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), p. 150. 7 Timothy Yu, ‘Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and the Impact of Theory’, in Rajini Srinkanth and Min Hyoung Song (eds), The Cambridge History of Asian American Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), p. 318. Yu demonstrates that Cha’s work attenuates the split in the study of Asian American literature between post-structuralist theory and the material conditions created by colonial power. 8 Staff of the Pacific Film Archive, ‘The Pacific Film Archive’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television, vol. 16, no. 1, 1996, p. 39. 9 Mladen Dolar, A Voice and Nothing More (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), pp. 10–11. 10 Christian Metz, ‘The Cinema: Language or Language System?’ in Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema, trans. Michael Taylor (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1991), p. 48. Christian Metz, ‘The Fiction Film and Its Spectator: A Metapsychological Study’, in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (ed.), Apparatus: Cinematic Apparatus: Selected Writings (New York: Tanam Press, 1980), pp. 373–409. 11 My understanding of the mother tongue has been shaped by Barbara Johnson’s Mother Tongues, particularly her claim that ‘[o]nly mothers are supposed to subordinate themselves entirely to the needs of someone else. The fantasy of being fully responded to is a fantasy we all have’. Barbara Johnson, ‘The Poet’s Mother’, in Mother Tongues: Sexuality, Trials, Motherhood, Translation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), p. 79. 12 Sigmund Freud, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, in J. Strachey (ed. and trans.), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 12 (London: Hogarth Press, 1958), p. 248. 13 Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, ‘Mourning or Melancholia: Introjection versus Incorporation’, in Nicholas T. Rand (ed. and trans.),The Shell and the Kernel: Renewals of Psychoanalysis, vol. 1 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 126. 14 Hansol H.B. Lee, Korean Grammar (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989); Ki-Moon Lee and S. Robert Ramsey, A History of the Korean Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). 15 Lee and Ramsey, A History of the Korean Language, p. 2. 16 Lee Hyun-hee, Park Sung-soo, and Yoon Nae-hyun, New History of Korea, trans. by Center for Information on Korean Culture (Jimondang: Center for Information on Korean Culture, 2005), p. 396. 17 Lee and Ramsey provide an in-depth overview of this history in their fifth chapter, ‘Late Middle Korean’, in A History of the Korean Language, pp. 100–240. 18 Lee, Korean Grammar, p. 2. Lee and Ramsey, A History of the Korean Language, p. 102. 19 Lee and Ramsey, A History of the Korean Language, p. 126; Lee Hyun-hee, Park Sung-soo, and Yoon Nae-hyan, New History of Korea, p. 396. 20 Hyaeweol Choi, Gender and Mission Encounters in Korea: New Women, Old Ways (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 2009), pp. 111–13; Michael J. Seth, A Concise History of Korea: From Antiquity to the Present, 2nd edn (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2016), p. 218. 21 Lawrence R. Rinder, ‘The Plurality of Entrances, the Opening of Networks, the Infinity of Languages’, in Constance M. Lewallen (ed.), The Dream of the Audience: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (1951–1982), (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 2001), p. 18. 22 Pamela N. Corey, ‘Siting the Artist’s Voice’, Art Journal, vol. 77, no. 4, Fall 2018, p. 86. 23 Lisa Lowe provides an astute analysis of the multiple languages that impinge Korea’s colonial and diasporic history. ‘Unfaithful to the Original: The Subject of Dictée’, in Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 1996), p. 139. 24 For histories of the colonial period, see Chong-Sik Lee, The Politics of Korean Nationalism (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1965), pp. 89–273; Kyung Moon Hwang, A History of Korea: An Episodic Narrative (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp. 172–94; Lee Hyun-hee, Park Sung-soo, and Yoon Nae-hyan, ‘Independence Movement and Nationalism’, in New History of Korea, pp. 533–54, which documents the extraction of resources and labour during colonial rule; Michael J. Seth, ‘Colonial Korea, 1910–1945’, pp. 283–324. 25 Michael J. Seth, ‘Colonial Korea, 1910–1945’, p. 311. 26 Michael E. Robinson charts how Japanese colonial policy controlled the written word in ‘Colonial Publication Policy and the Korean Nationalist Movement’, in Ramon H. Myers and Mark R. Peattie (eds), The Japanese Colonial Empire, 1895–1945 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), pp. 312–43. 27 See Hyunah Yang, ‘Re-membering the Korean Military Comfort Women: Nationalism, Sexuality, and Silencing’, in Elaine H. Kim and Chungmoo Choi (eds), Dangerous Women: Gender and Korean Nationalism (New York and London: Routledge 1998), pp. 123–39. 28 Hyaeweol Choi, ‘Introduction: New Women in Discursive and Historical Space’, in New Women in Colonial Korea: A Sourcebook (London and New York: Routledge, 2013), p. 7. 29 Andrew C. Nahm reports that thousands of girls and women participated in the March First Movement and over four hundred were arrested in the course of the police crackdown. Andrew C. Nahm, Korea: Tradition & Transformation, 2nd edn (Elizabeth, NJ and Seoul: Hollym International Corp.), p. 206. 30 Choi, ‘Introduction: New Women in Discursive and Historical Space’, p. 5. 31 See Chong-Sik Lee, ‘The March First Movement’, The Politics of Korean Nationalism (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1965), pp. 89–126; and Lee Hyun-hee, Park Sung-soo, and Yoon Nae-hyan, ‘Independence Movement and Nationalism’, in New History of Korea, pp. 533–54, which outlines the multiple historical and cultural factors that lead to the uprising and charts its reverberations. For an overview of the March First Movement and the nationalist intellectual movements that emerged from it, see Michael J. Seth, ‘Colonial Korea, 1910–1945’, pp. 285–98. Kyung Moon Hwang tells the history of the March First Movement and links it to the modernisation of Korea, focusing on the new freedoms available to women. ‘The Long 1920s’, A History of Korea, pp. 161–71. 32 Seungsook Moon, ‘Begetting the Nation: The Androcentric Discourse of National History and Tradition in South Korea’, in Dangerous Women, p. 51. Elaine H. Kim and Chungmoo Choi, ‘Introduction’, in Dangerous Women, p. 14. 33 Kim and Choi, ‘Introduction’, Dangerous Women, p. 14. 34 Luce Irigaray, ‘Women’s Exile: Interview with Luce Irigaray’, trans. by Couze Venn, Ideology and Consciousness, vol. 1, 1977, p. 71. 35 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Nationalism and the Imagination (London: Seagull Press, 2010), p. 13. Nayanika Mookherjee, ‘Reproductive Heteronormativity and Sexual Violence in the Bangladesh War of 1971: A Discussion with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’, Social Text, vol. 1, 2012, p. 124. 36 Mookherjee and Spivak, ‘Reproductive Heteronormativity’, p. 124. 37 Spivak, Nationalism and the Imagination, p. 14–15. 38 Yang, ‘Re-membering the Korean Military Comfort Women’, p. 140. See also Hyun Sook Kim, ‘History and Memory: The “Comfort Women” Controversy’, in Chungmoo Choi (ed.), special issue, ‘The Comfort Women: Colonialism, War, and Sex’, positions: east asia cultures critique, vol. 5, no. 1, Spring 1997, pp. 73–108. 39 Moon, ‘Begetting the Nation’, pp. 45, 64. 40 Ellen Brinks, ‘Winnicott’s Maternal Aesthetic: Absorption and Beholding in Potential Space, in Sarah Hardy and Carolyn Wiedmer (eds), Motherhood and Space: Configurations of the Maternal through Politics, Home, and the Body (New York: Palgrave, 2005), p. 262. 41 Kaja Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema (Bloomfield and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 1988), p. 72. 42 Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror, p. 100. 43 Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror, p. 50. 44 Dolar, A Voice and Nothing More, p. 10. 45 Kim, ‘The Forgotten War’, p. 147. 46 This formulation has been informed by Gayle Rubin, ‘The Traffic in Women: Notes on the “Political Economy” of Sex’, in Karen V. Hansen and Ilene J. Phillipson (eds.), Women, Class, and the Feminist Imagination: A Socialist-Feminist Reader (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1990), pp. 74–113. 47 I am referring here to ‘Woman as Sign’, a concept that feminist scholars working within semiotics and post-structuralist theory from the 1970s forward have used to identify how the exchange of women can be understood in the terms offered by structural linguistics. See Elizabeth Cowie, ‘Woman as Sign’, in Parveen Adams and Elizabeth Cowie (eds), The Woman in Question: m/f (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), pp. 117–31. 48 Engaging ideas such intergenerational inheritance and maternal intimacy, both Lowe’s ‘Unfaithful to the Original’ and Kun Jong Lee’s ‘Rewriting Hesiod, Revisioning Korea: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée as a Subversive Hesiodic Catalogue of Women’ work within a psychoanalytic register – particularly as it has been inflected by feminism – but not explicitly. Since psychoanalysis has been understood to be ahistorical, this makes sense, but I argue that attending to the psychoanalytic concepts that manifest in Cha’s work helps us recognise her efforts to represent subjective relationships to Korean history. Kun Jong Lee’s ‘Rewriting Hesiod, Revisioning Korea: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée as a Subversive Hesiodic Catalogue of Women’, College Literature, vol. 3, no. 3, Summer 2006, pp. 77–99. 49 Rosalind Krauss, ‘Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism’, October, vol. 1, Spring 1976, p. 55. 50 Krauss, ‘Video’, p. 52. 51 Krauss, ‘Video’, p. 58. 52 Krauss, ‘Video’, p. 58. 53 I am referring to Sigmund Freud’s concept of ‘working-through’ from ‘Remembering, Repeating and Working- Through (Further Recommendations on the Technique of Psycho-analysis II)’, in J. Strachey (ed. and trans), The Standard Edition, vol. 12, 1914, pp. 145–56. My understanding of ‘working-through’ and the frozen time of pathological memories is indebted to Adam Phillips, ‘On “Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through,” Again’, Contemporary Psychoanalysis, vol. 52, no. 3, 2016, p. 375. 54 Jacques Lacan, ‘The Mirror Stage as Formative of the “I” Function, as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience’, in Écrits: A Selection, trans. by Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 2002), pp. 2–9. 55 Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 71. 56 Jacques Derrida, ‘Videor’, in Michael Renov and Erika Suderburg (eds), Resolutions: Contemporary Video Practices (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), p. 74. 57 Trinh T. Minh-Ha, ‘White Spring’, in The Dream of the Audience: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (1951–1982), p. 35. 58 Susan Best, ‘The Dream of the Audience: The Moving Images of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’, in Visualizing Feeling: Affect and the Feminine Avant-Garde (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2011), p. 126. Kristine Stiles also points out that Vidéoème brings together the words video and poem. Stiles, ‘Performance Art and the Experiential Present’, p. 335. 59 Rinder, ‘The Plurality of Entrances, the Opening of Networks, the Infinity of Language’, p. 19. Cha’s work is included in the exhibition catalog, Un Coup de Dés: Writing Turned Image. An Alphabet of Pensive Language, ed. by Sabine Folie (Vienna: Generali Foundation; Cologne: Walther König, 2009), pp. 130–4. This exhibition brings together the work of modern and contemporary artists who draw from Mallarmé’s work. 60 Trinh T. Minh-Ha, ‘White Spring’, p. 41. 61 Lawrence R. Rinder, ‘Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’, in Sabine Folie (ed.), Un Coup de Dés: Writing Turned Image. An Alphabet of Pensive Language (Vienna: Generali Foundation; Cologne: Walther König, 2009), p. 132. 62 Griselda Pollock, ‘The Image in Psychoanalysis and the Archaeological Metaphor’, in Griselda Pollock (ed.), Psychoanalysis and the Image: Transdisciplinary Perspectives (Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2006), p. 3. 63 Anne Anlin Cheng, ‘History in/against the Fragment: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’, The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 160. 64 Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, ‘Personal Statement and Outline of Postdoctoral Project’, 1978, p. 2. Theresa Hak Kyung Cha Collection 1971–1991, Berkeley Art Museum / Pacific Film Archive, UC Berkeley. 65 Josephine Park, ‘The Forgotten War in Korea’, in The Cambridge History of Asian American Literature, p. 435. 66 Kim, ‘The Forgotten War’, p. 145. 67 Kim, ‘The Forgotten War’, p. 145. 68 Chungmoo Choi, ‘Guest Editor’s Introduction’, in special issue, ‘The Comfort Women: Colonialism, War, and Sex’, positions: East Asia Cultures Critique, vol. 5, no. 1, Spring 1997, p. v. Elaine H. Kim, ‘Poised on the In-between: A Korean American’s Reflections on Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée’, in Elaine H. Kim and Norma Alarcón (eds), Writing Self / Writing Nation: A Collection of Essays on Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée (Berkeley, CA: Third Woman Press, 1994), p.10. 69 Grace M. Cho, Haunting the Korean Diaspora: Shame, Secrecy, and the Forgotten War (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), p. 5. 70 Cho, Haunting the Korean Diaspora, p. 5. 71 Cho, Haunting the Korean Diaspora, pp. 3–4. 72 Cho, Haunting the Korean Diaspora, p. 35. 73 Cho, Haunting the Korean Diaspora, p. 11. For Ramasy Liem’s oral history project and online exhibition, ‘Still Present Pasts: Korean Americans and the “Forgotten War”’, see <http://www.stillpresentpasts.org/my-mother.html> [accessed April 2020]. 74 This formulation draws from Pamela N. Corey’s concept of ‘archival intertextuality’. Corey, ‘Siting the Artist’s Voice’, p. 85. 75 Mandy Bloomfield, ‘“The word. The image”: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Fractured Forms’, in Archaeopoetics: Word, Image, History (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2016), p. 98. 76 Abraham and Torok, ‘Mourning or Melancholia’, pp. 126–7. 77 Abraham and Torok, ‘Mourning or Melancholia’, pp. 127–8. 78 Abraham and Torok, ‘Mourning or Melancholia’, p. 126. 79 Abraham and Torok, ‘Mourning or Melancholia’, p. 128. 80 Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Dictée 1982 (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 2001), p. 45. 81 Cha, Dictée, p. 48–9. Kun notes that Cha drew from her mother’s journals for ‘Calliope Epic Poetry’ and thereby challenges the masculinist underpinnings of the epic. He also cites Hyung Soon Huo Cha’s collection of essays, published in 1997, Naega doogo on jaekeun heukjeom, The Little Black Spot I Left Behind. Kun, ‘Rewriting Hesiod, Revisioning Korea’, pp. 80, 87, 96–7. 82 Lowe, ‘Unfaithful to the Original’, p. 138. 83 Lowe, ‘Unfaithful to the Original’, p. 138. 84 Lowe, ‘Unfaithful to the Original’, p. 139. 85 Lowe, ‘Unfaithful to the Original’, p. 140. 86 Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror, p. 100. 87 Cha, Dictée, p. 45–6. 88 Cha, Dictée, p. 46. Elaine H. Kim makes Cha’s citation of ‘Bong Sun Hwa’ part of her response to Dictée. She describes the display of the song as a ‘fragment of an endangered identity’ that made her ‘uneasy’. Kim, ‘Poised on the In-between’, p. 5. 89 Cha, Dictée, pp. 49–50. 90 Cha, Dictée, p. 48. 91 Cha, Dictée, p. 56. 92 Choi, ‘Introduction: New Women in Discursive and Historical Space’, p. 5. 93 Kun Jong Lee argues that the female figures in Dictée can be described as a ‘catalogue of women’ that represents Cha’s feminist rewriting of Hesiod’s Catalogue of Women. Whereas the women in Hesiod’s poem are, according to Kun, ‘instruments of reproduction’, Cha chose to create a ‘community of women’ who ‘share a common dissatisfaction with the role of women in the face of patriarchal assumptions encoded in mythical texts, nationalist ideology, religious instruction, cultural interpellation, and colonial indoctrination’. Kun, ‘Rewriting Hesiod, Revisioning Korea’, pp. 79, 94–5. 94 Cheng, ‘History in/against the Fragment’, p. 147. 95 Cha, Dictée, p. 118. 96 I am referring to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s formulation, ‘a picture held us captive. And we could not get outside of it, for it lay in our language, and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably’. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. by G.E.M. Anscombe (New York: Macmillan, 1968), p. 48. 97 Cha, Dictée, p. 97. 98 Cha, Dictée, p. 98. 99 Cha, Dictée, p. 99. 100 Lowe, ‘Unfaithful to the Original’, p. 140. 101 Lowe, ‘Unfaithful to the Original’, p. 140. 102 Abraham and Torok, ‘Mourning or Melancholia’, p. 128. © The Author(s) 2020. Published by Oxford University Press; all rights reserved This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - Mouth Work: Writing the Voice of the Mother Tongue in the Art of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha
JO - Oxford Art Journal
DO - 10.1093/oxartj/kcaa011
DA - 2020-12-03
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SP - 1
EP - 1
VL - Advance Article
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DP - DeepDyve
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