“Moving Shadows Disappearing”: Erasure of Self in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Autobiographical “Photo-essay”

Before publishing her today-cult hybrid memoir Dictée, Korean American writer and visual artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha had produced a very large body of work which most often combines text and images. This is the case of a short autobiographical photo-essay, a handmade artist book featuring short poetic texts placed alongside photographs in which Cha explores her early years in America as a Korean exile in the 1960s and 1970s. Beyond the uncertain referentiality of the poetic fragments and images, a striking feature of the work is the surprising elusiveness of Cha herself both in the photographs and in the texts; the piece thus hinges on an absent centre, that vacated by the artist herself. This chapter analyses Cha’s highly experimental take on both the genre of the photo-essay and the autobiographical mode in this labile text-image apparatus, focusing on its complex play on an unresolved tension between referentiality and reflexivity and eventually arguing that it is through self-erasure that the artist paradoxically best exposes herself.