
Reviews "Reads like a secret dossier, stuffed with epistles and pictures, religion, and dreams." - Village Voice "It remains as radical a text as it was when I first found it, daring to hold a space open somewhere in between several genres, and to let tensions remain unresolved, or ambiguous, to pursue if not the articulation of the inarticulate, then, to let the reader experience what is inarticulate within themselves still in a space that makes room for it or even values it." -Alexander Chee, Electric Lit "Too often, of course, the colonizing function of language goes about its invisible work without comment, but in Dictée each scene, each image, each poem or letter purposefully refers us back to it." - Paris Review " Dictée addresses themes of time, language, and memory that recur in much of the artist’s work while incorporating multiple forms of media, language, and historical material.Nine chapters, structured around the muses of Greek mythology, result in a form that is novel, prose poem, biography, and photo book all at once." - Hyperallergic " Dictée was one of the first books that taught me the transformative power that art could have on the material of a life-that conceptual art wasn’t only populated by urban white folks, and lives like Cha’s or mine or my mother’s could make a strange and wild home there, too." -Elaine Castillo, Electric Lit The result is an enduringly powerful, beautiful, unparalleled work. Links the women’s stories to explore the trauma of dislocation and the fragmentation of memory it causes.

Deploys a variety of texts, documents, images, and forms of address and inquiry.Structures the story in nine parts around the Greek Muses.High-quality reproductions of the interior layoutĭictee tells the story of several women: the Korean revolutionary Yu Guan Soon, Joan of Arc, Demeter and Persephone, Cha’s mother Hyung Soon Huo (a Korean born in Manchuria to first-generation Korean exiles), and Cha herself.This restored edition, produced in partnership with the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA), reflects Cha’s original vision for the book as an art object in its authentic form, featuring: Originally published in 1982, Dictee is a classic of modern Asian American literature.ĭictee is the best-known work of the multidisciplinary Korean American artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha.

Newly restored, this version of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s masterpiece honors the author's original intentions and vision for the book.
