Collection Online
Search the Collection 搜索M+藏品
M+, Hong Kong, © Theresa Hak Kyung Cha/Electronic Arts Intermix
Vidéoème 影像詩
1976
An artist, performer, and novelist, Korean-born Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (1951–1982) often reflected on how the experience of immigrating to the United States at an early age informed her understanding of language and identity. The multilingual aspect of her practice is evident in Vidéoème. The title is a French neologism that combines the word for video (derived from -videre, ‘I see’ in Latin) with that for poetry, poème. Working at the intersection of video and poetry, Vidéoème dismantles words into small parts to underline the arbitrariness of language. Against a dark background, English words including ‘see’, ‘empty’, and ‘sound’ slowly fade in and out. The soundtrack features Cha speaking these words, but the audio is not synchronised with the screen image. Cha disrupts our expectation for communication, expressing displacement and loss symbolically through the presentation of linguistic fragments.
Loading