Exilee and Temps Morts

Exilée and Temps Morts: Selected Works is a collection of writing and art by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (1951–1982), who, with her family, emigrated from South Korea to San Francisco in 1964. This volume, edited by curator Constance M. Lewallen, presents writing, mail art (some of it featured on the book cover), a photo-essay, visual poetry, and moving storyboards, stills, and treatments for Cha’s unfinished film, White Dust from Magnolia. Though Cha’s visionary, genre-bending work, Dictée, is widely known and read today, the work in this new, beautifully produced edition was only previously available in limited-run, out-of-print sources, if at all.

As the title suggests, the collection is centered around two texts, “second only to Dictée in scope and significance,” according to Lewallen. “Exilée,” which was drawn from “Cha’s eponymous film/video installation,” and “Temps Morts,” a stand-alone work written after Cha traveled to Korea and Japan while working on her film in 1980. In his keen introductory essay, Ed Park writes of the texts’ titles:

For Cha, the condition of exile is dead time (temps morts), however fertile it may prove for creative work […]. As with Dictée, the title itself performs an initial alienation—French instead of English, which conjures Cha’s more primal exchange, English instead of Korean.

Throughout the work, and especially in “Temps Morts” and what Park calls the “disjecta membra”—scattered fragments, now collected in the latter half of the book—Cha deconstructs, remixes, and reassembles words and phrases in both French and English, often expressing an ambivalence toward linguistic communication and a painful relationship with memory and time. In “Exilée,” these threads come together:

Backwards.      from backwards from the back way back.
to This           This phantom image/non-images
almost non-images        without images.        each ante-
moment         moment no more.     no more a moment
a moment no duration.       no time.       phantom no visible
no name no duration no memory no reflection no echo

This collection of Cha’s early reckoning—through art and poetry—with life in the United States, as part of the Korean diaspora, offers inspiring and, at times, haunting, glimpses into Cha’s creative origins and processes.