Date of Award
Spring 2026
Document Type
M.A. Essay
First Advisor
Mimi Thi Nguyen
Second Advisor
Miya Qiong Xie
Abstract
Language is the main body of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s multimedia practice. While scholarship on Cha tends to read her linguistic experimentation as resistance to the symbolic operation of language through fragmentation and disruption, this essay reexamines her work by theorizing “the materiality of language”— a sustained reinvention of language as a material medium through which alternative modes of relationality become possible. Cha activates the visual, sonic, and embodied dimensions of language that conventional symbolic reading suppresses, opening forms of intimacy, resonance, and return grounded in sensorial encounter rather than in transparent knowing. Borrowing Roland Barthes’s method of the “text,” this essay treats Cha’s Dictee as a point of entry into her broader artistic practice — her video Mouth to Mouth, her mail art Audience Distant Relative, and her visual and written works — to trace three modes of relationality that materialized language enables: embodied encounter between subject and reader through breath and rhythm; collective resonance through overlapping voices and shared sonic space; and material intimacy with the lost mother tongue through bodily gesture. What emerges across these attempts is a prior mode of being — being with one another’s body, with the lost inhabited in the body, through sound, breath, and visual proximity — a relationality that, in Cha’s words, occurs “before any ‘making’ even begins.” In addition to reframing Cha’s formal experimentation from linguistic disruption to a more positive reinvention, this essay rethinks the condition of exile not as a site of discursive making but as an embodied condition of stripping away the stable framework, where what lies “before making” becomes always already perceptible as a potential ground for alternative relation. Taken together, Cha’s practice invites us to reframe diaspora not only as loss or political struggle, but as a site of generativity within loss, “a salvation from the struggle” alongside the struggle itself.
Recommended Citation
Zeng, Wenyu, "Before Any “Making”: The Materiality of Language in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Work" (2026). Comparative Literature M.A. Essays. 222.
https://digitalcommons.dartmouth.edu/complit_essays/222
