Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Performance Art and Daoist Imagination in Audience Distant Relative

Abstract

This paper explores Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Daoist imagination, suggesting that Daoism serves as an important conduit for her literary innovation. While she engaged with the orthodox (i.e., Laozi/Zhuangzi’s text-based Chinese) Daoist philosophy and aesthetics, she regarded Daoism as a kind of nomadic spiritual tradition that allows the postmodern idea of writing as openness and inclusion. To show Cha’s Daoist influence in the 1970s, I examine her performance artwork Audience Distant Relative along with her M.F.A. thesis titled “Paths” where she explains how to flesh out the idea of dao (道) or “the way.” Attesting to Roland Barthes’s idea of the “writerly text” and Walter Benjamin’s concept of the “storyteller,” Cha’s Daoist work urges us to be more open and inclusive to the external world, and eventually to conceive of the world in a holistic way.