Fragile Relations: Form, History, and Embodiment in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha

Speaker: Ina Choi, Research Scholar in Asian and Middle Eastern Cultures at Barnard College, Columbia University.

Moderator: TBD

Ina Choi is a scholar of modern and contemporary Asian art working at the intersection of art history and cultural theory. She received her PhD in East Asian Languages and Civilizations from the University of Pennsylvania in 2025. Her research examines modern and contemporary Korean and Chinese art from global and transnational perspectives, with particular attention to medium, materiality, affect, and intermediality. She explores how artistic practices across painting, text, film, and installation mediate histories of colonialism, migration, gender, and racialization, and how material surfaces become sites of embodied historical encounter. She is currently a Research Scholar in Asian and Middle Eastern Cultures at Barnard College, Columbia University. Her work bridges Korean Studies, Asian American studies, and global contemporary art history, emphasizing historically situated forms of sensation and material intimacy as critical methods for rethinking art historical paradigms.

Ina Choi will speak on “Fragile Relations: Form, History, and Embodiment in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha" on Tuesday, March 24 from 4:00 to 5:30 PM.

This talk reconsiders Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s work through the fragile relations between form, history, and embodiment. Rather than reading Cha solely through postmodern conceptualism or postcolonial identity, I argue that her intermedial practice, across text, performance, and film, stages a material entanglement of language, body, and historical memory.

Focusing on Surplus Novel, Aveugle Voix, and Dictée, I show how fragmentation, opacity, and linguistic rupture function not simply as formal strategies or political symbols, but as embodied sites where colonialism, racial misrecognition, and diaspora are sensed rather than narrated. Drawing on feminist and affect theory, I propose “historically situated affect” as a way to understand how Cha’s work produces a fragile mode of aesthetic relation that unsettles both subjectless conceptualism and identity-driven interpretation.

PLEASE NOTE: For non-Columbia guests, registration is required to access the Morningside campus 24 hours prior to the event. After registering you will receive an email with a QR code that must be presented along with a government-issued ID (your name must match exactly the name registered for the event) at either the 116th Street & Broadway or 116th Street & Amsterdam gates for entry. Please register using a unique email address (one email address per registrant) by 12:00 PM on Monday, March 23 for campus access.

Names will be submitted for QR codes 1-2 days prior to the event and subsequently reviewed. Registrants will receive an email from CU Guest Access with the QR code before or on the day of the event.

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Host or Publisher Center for Korean Research