Born in Pusan (South Korea) in 1951, when the Korean War was breaking out, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha grew up in Hawaii and then on the West Coast of the United States. During her short life (she died in New York in 1982), she developed a conceptual body of work subtly informed by Korean shamanic culture. As of 1974, she was inspired by the poststructuralism of Roland Barthes and the feminism of Laura Mulvey. Combining performance, writing, film and video, her practice is marked by exile. She was interested in crossing thresholds in order to explore processes of translation and transformation.

Permutations was made in 1976, when the artist was spending six months in Paris on a residency. A young woman’s face emerges within the frame of the image: at first, facing the camera, then seen from behind, showing her long black hair, then frontally again, with her eyes closed. Next the screen goes white, then black. These images form units that in appearance are very simple. In their combination, however, the shots succeed but do not repeat each other: subtle variations in the takes increasingly disturb the repetitive grid of these permutations. The face, which seems to be spinning on its axis, is that of the artist’s sister, Bernadette, although towards the end of the film the artist herself appears in an almost subliminal vision. Corresponding to the regard caméra (“look to the camera”) of New Wave cinema (think of Anna Karina in Jean-Luc Godard’s films), the work oscillates between revelation and refusal, between movement and immobility. It interrogates what it is in the image that shows itself, remains silent, or is absent.

Marcella Lista, 2020