"The Dream of the Audience: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (1951-1982)" will be exhibited Jan. 20 through March 10 at the Beall Center for Art and Technology at UC Irvine's Claire Trevor School of the Arts. The exhibition is a retrospective show of the works of Cha, an influential Korean-American artist who worked in media ranging from performance, film and video to mail art and artist books.

A panel discussion will be held at 2 p.m. on opening day, Jan. 20, in Studio Four, Room 209. A group of professors from UC Irvine, UC San Diego and UC Berkeley will discuss Cha's art and influence--her work has become increasingly important and relevant to a broad range of disciplines from ethnic studies, Asian American Studies and women's studies to film, literature and linguistics as well as visual and performance art.

Cha's personal experience of geographic exile and cultural and linguistic displacement is fundamental to her work, which is distinguished by multiple cultural references and languages, including Korean, French and English. The exhibition will feature extensive documentation of Cha's performances, video and film installations, sculpture, artist books, works on paper and documentation relating to the unfinished film "White Dust from Mongolia," which the artist was working on at the time of her murder in New York in 1982 at the age of 31.

"Cha was an early active practitioner of new technologies of her time, which was multi-channel video, and as with new media artists of today, Cha was very interested in extending the possibilities of new media," said Yong Soon Min, professor and chair of the Studio Art Department at UCI and a colleague and friend of Cha's. "This exhibit offers us insight into the arts and technology as part of the continuum of history--there have always been artists interested in new technologies, but Cha was a bold experimenter, using technology with an expansive and singular voice. She also was one of the first to seriously examine her identity and incorporate high art and her personal life, making the personal political."

Cha moved with her family from South Korea to San Francisco in 1964 and earned four degrees from UC Berkeley: a bachelor's in comparative literature (1973) and a bachelor of arts (1975), master of arts (1977) and master of fine arts (1978) in art practice. During the last two years of her life, she lived in New York City, where she created her final work, "Dictee," a book combining family history, autobiography, stories of female martyrdom, poetry and images. Coming of age as an artist in the San Francisco Bay area in the 1970s, Cha was at the center of a series of influential artistic movements, including conceptual art, performance art and video.

"The Dream of the Audience: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (1951-1982)" was originally organized by the UC Berkeley Art Museum and the Pacific Film Archive.
The Beall Center is open noon to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday and noon to 8 p.m. Thursday. Admission is free. For more information, call (949) 824-6202 or visit the Web site at beallcenter.uci.edu.