Mouth to Mouth

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha

Mouth to Mouth, 1975

Artwork text

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha is born in Korea in 1951; when she is thirteen, her family moves to the United States. Her immigrant experience proves formative for her work as a visual artist and writer; she grapples with cultural and linguistic forms of rootlessness and explores the importance of language and the loss of a language for the formation of personal identity. Mouth to Mouth is an intimate video sketch in which Cha represents the alienation from her native Korean language as an inner struggle. The video opens with an image of writing: the camera slowly pans over letters spelling out the English words of the title. Then the artist’s mouth appears in an extreme close-up shot. Her lips form the eight Korean vowels without audibly pronouncing them. White noise gradually swallows up the mouth. Any suggestion of spoken language is drowned out by ambient sounds—flowing water, birdsong. The video conveys a kind of inner conflict: one the one hand, the imposed silence over the mother tongue; on the other hand, the artist’s almost physical need to express herself in this same, her primary, language. (JT)