Theresa Hak Kyung Cha was an artist never satisfied with one mode of art-making, she flitted between mediums, selecting whichever best reflect her preoccupations: the traces of history, the movement of people in exile and diaspora, and the slippery nature of language in just one way. In her hands, no concept feels definitive or fixed; rather, these weighty ideas are always fluid, ever adapting to the moment—even now, four decades after her untimely death. Cha’s distinctive approach is perhaps best illustrated by Dictée, a short volume that merges poetry, memoir, calligraphy, and the hagiography of revolutionary women like Joan of Arc, Yu Gwan-sun, and her mother Hyun Soon Huo.

Published in the fall of 1982, just weeks before her murder, Dictée cemented Cha as a singular voice whose words could resonate with readers from even beyond the ether. In the decades since, it has become an essential text in academic fields ranging from comparative literature to Asian American studies. More recently, her oeuvre, particularly her filmic work, has gained renewed attention from the art world, following a memorable presentation dedicated to Cha at the 2022 Whitney Biennial.

And in recent years, contemporary artists, including Na Mira and Cici Wu, have since dug into her archives to create new work that seemingly continues where Cha left off. Meanwhile, the institutional steward of her art and archives, the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archives (BAMPFA), opened this winter the most comprehensive retrospective of Cha to date , titled “Multiple Offerings,” which closes Sunday. Not only has Cha not had an exhibition of this scale in 25 years, but the interest in her work has also drastically increased: three-quarters of all research requests to BAMPFA’s holdings are related to Cha.

In the works for three years, the exhibition also spurred a massive effort to re-catalog BAMPFA’s entire Cha collection and archive, which numbers around 26,000 objects. The show takes its name from the open-ended conceptual framework Cha applied to her practice- “Multiple Telling with Multiple Offerings”, as she described it—in which viewers were invited to create new meaning via how they experience the art. The exhibition, expertly curated by Victoria Sung, is expansive and wide-ranging, poignantly invoking Cha’s spirit in the galleries.

Over 100 works by Cha are paired with pieces by 10 other artists, an intergenerational mix of Cha’s mentors, contemporaries, and artists generations younger who have been influenced by Cha’s her disparate practice. Cici Wu, Upon Leaving the White Dust, 2017/2018, installation view, “Theresa Hak Kyung Cha: Multiple Offerings,” 2026, at BAMPFA. Photo Chris Grunder The exhibition begins by invoking the Cha family via Untitled (Poem to Mother and Father), an ink on cloth work from the 1970s written in the Korean sijo poetic form, installed at the entrance.

Cha’s family was central not only to her art-making, as her siblings were often collaborators, but also to the preservation of her legacy: they made multiple donations of Cha’s work to BAMPFA, beginning in 1992. She stamped the corner of Untitled (Poem) with her thumb print in red ink, a way to mark her lineage. In the poem, she thanks her parents for giving her life, raising her, and making her life as an artist possible.

She ends with a question, one that speaks to the familial relationships that animate this exhibition and her legacy more broadly, “Where could I ever repay them / for their loving kindness, infinite as the sky?” The exhibition traces Cha’s career mostly chronologically, focusing on the geographic nodes of where she lived and worked between 1969 and 1982, starting with the decade she spent at UC Berkeley, which houses BAMPFA, where she earned four degrees. Later, it moves to her time spent in France and New York, as well as her return to South Korea, which she left in 1962 when she was 12. Installation view of “Theresa Hak Kyung Cha: Multiple Offerings,” 2026, at Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archives, showing Untitled (Poem to Mother and Father).

Photo Chris Grunder Even Cha’s early works in more traditional mediums point toward how her practice would evolve in the coming years. As a young undergraduate, she made work at Peter Voulkos’s ceramic studio, located on Berkeley’s Shattuck Avenue. One work produced in his studio and on view at BAMPFA is clearly influenced by the Bay Areas ceramics scene of the late 1960s and early ’70s—a mix of funky and formal.

But still, Cha has added her own twist by incorporating elements of traditional Korean dal hangari (moon jars). Such inspirations might not be immediately legible to most visitors, but that is part of what makes Cha’s art thrilling to this day: with a little research, aspects of her art reveal itself, while other elements remain forever unknowable. Cha reveled in that space of uncertainty—and if visitors open themselves that realm, they may find comfort there. Installation view o