Jana Hsu

Media res

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arts@sfbg.com

VISUAL ART/LIT Teresa Hak Kyung Cha isn’t the most famous female representative of conceptual art and the marriage between text and film. But this visual artist and prose lyricist — born in 1951, killed in 1982 — found new zones between film language and the written word. Her body of work, now a hallmark for lesser-known Asian and feminist artists, roughly spans from 1972 to 1981. Cha consciously employs the fragmentation and displacement of text on a page, the flap of an envelope, or carefully selected superimposed images in film, as in the unfinished circa-1980 White Dust From Mongolia.

In White Dust, a young Korean woman experiences physical, cultural, and psychological alienation in China when she is forced to leave Korea during the Japanese occupation. Cha’s purposeful isolation of language and deployment of linguistic breakdowns is instrumental in showing the cultural and geographical dislocation experienced by the film’s main character. In a project proposal, Cha writes that this harrowing experience causes the film’s young woman to "lose all memory and her capacity for speech." The question of whether White Dust‘s female subject can be likened to the artist herself has generated speculation by art historians and museum curators alike.

White Dust superimposes images of Korean women milling through a market and the face of a girl trying to remember. Was Cha creating a story about herself within American society? In 1980’s "Surplus Novel," one of Cha’s lyric poems within Exilee/Temps Morts: Selected Works (University of California Press, 288 pages, $24.95), the author recounts the personal experience of being called a "Yoko Ono," a fraction of one moment within a lifetime of painful cultural estrangement.

On the page, in medias res, are Cha’s deliberately fragmented words evocative of mistaken identity and the splintering of self? In her journals, she notes that she is primarily interested in "how words and meanings are constructed in the language system itself, by function or usage and how transformation is brought about through manipulation, processes such as changing syntax, isolation, removing from context, repetition, and reduction to minimal units."

Cha the conceptual literary artist was interested in showing and interpreting cultural detachment through her art, fueled by examples from the breathing wound of daily life. Even with a grant, Cha never completed White Dust. She was forced off Seoul’s streets due to political unrest in Korea following the October 1979 assassination of President Park Chung Hee. Three years later, she was murdered in New York City by a serial rapist working as a security guard.

The meanings and appearances of words are to the fore as one walks the rounds of "Theresa Hak Kyung Cha: Earth," a Berkeley Art Museum exhibition curated by Constance M. Lewallen, who also edited Exilee/Temps Morts: Selected Works. Words in French, Korean, and English are interspersed with the white space of blank pages that yield no answers. The French word feuilee — which can translate to leaves of a page or literally to "leaf"— is typed in different positions on several sheets of white paper. This gesture may embody the physical movement of falling leaves in autumn, or the structure of Cha’s writing.

Viewers must forge their own interpretations of Cha’s elliptical and occasionally whimsical texts, which sometimes read like song lyrics or chants. Cha’s words lean one toward a growing belief that it is our literary license to break her words down into our own meanings — to shift our attention from the storyteller to the story told. Perhaps then the reality of her murder in the SoHo district’s Puck Building might not be such a slap in the face.

Tethered by her untimely death, the caliber of Cha’s contribution to the art world remains a puzzle. Yet the aesthetic pulse of the day orders one to ignore the conceptual fray. Cha is a thoroughly detail-oriented literary and visual artist. Her methodical work doesn’t entertain or dazzle. It is open-ended in a way that requires its audience to supply part of the vision.

THERESA HAK KYUNG CHA: EARTH

Through Dec. 20, $5–$8 (free for UC students and children)

Berkeley Art Museum

2626 Bancroft, Berk.

(510) 642-0808

www.bampfa.org

Vicious skate

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Like many artists, Henry Gunderson, a 19-year-old who attends the San Francisco Art Institute, focuses on "process, not product." But the similarity ends there. Gunderson’s paintings have a diaphanous, primordial sensibility; it’s a dog-eats-dog world, as depicted in his piece Everybody Eats Somebody, wherein fish begets vulture begets cat begets a winged bird with human molars lined up in the forefront for kicks.

Gunderson’s paintings have been showcased at Fecal Face Dot Gallery, 111 Minna Gallery, and White Walls in SF, and will be seen soon in San Diego at Subtext Gallery and Toronto at Show and Tell Gallery. His is no drip-drop kitsch art. His work brings vivifying eyeplay over landscapes of faces and bodies. It possesses the bright polychromy of baroque art, but with individual sketches of a skateboard or two thrown in for visual effect. Such juxtapositions and themes of overlapping parasitism are characteristic. At times stupefying, Gunderson’s figurative images are evidence of an enviable talent. The hard edges, flattened spaces, and sharp dissecting corners are not quite George Braque and not quite Henry Darger. This juggernaut of faces and beheaded bodies and faces is Gunderson’s world, or at least the one he retreats to on canvas. He’s running on a different engine, and his images hum and even hurt the teeth a little, but in a good way.

I recently met up with Gunderson — a lanky figure in turtle-green skinny jeans and a striped shirt — at his school studio at the San Francisco Art Institute.

SFBG At what age did you decide you liked to draw?

Henry Gunderson Since I was really young, I remember liking to draw just like any kid. I think I started out with crayons on walls.

SFBG What would you call the painting that you’re working on right now?

HG This one’s untitled at the moment, and it’s done with acrylic paint like many of my other paintings. I usually don’t title my work until I feel it’s done.

SFBG What would you say is the message behind some of your other paintings?

HG The piece Everybody Eats Somebody shows the hierarchy of animals in the food chain, but it also carries an underlying message about human beings.

SFBG And what would that be?

HG We’re vicious animals too. What exists in other animals also exists in human nature.

SFBG What are your goals? What would you like people to take away from your art?

HG Not a direct message, really, but just an emotion when they look at the painting — any emotion, even depression. Usually when I am drawing, I don’t really focus on how others will take in the finished product. I just kind of space out and really get into what I am doing.

SFBG Do you want to channel your talent into a future career, or will painting always be more of a side thing?

HG Hopefully it would be a career path I can make a living from, but I’d like to stick to my own vision and not do too much commercial stuff. I’ve always pretty much [maintained] my own way of doing things, and my art is no different. If people like what they see, then that’s great. I don’t have too many commercial goals, and I hope I never will have to use that medium for my art.