ARTnews Names Theresa Hak Kyung Cha Historical Artist of the Year

ARTnews has named Theresa Hak Kyung Cha its Historical Artist of the Year for 2026, citing the retrospective "Theresa Hak Kyung Cha: Multiple Offerings" at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, on view January 24–April 19, 2026, before traveling to Artists Space in New York (September 11–November 21, 2026). The award honors a deceased artist who is the subject of a major museum survey offering a new lens on their work. Victoria Sung curated the exhibition, with Tausif Noor.

Cha has been a touchstone for academics and artists since her death in 1982. She is best known for Dictée, a genre-defying book that combines fiction, memoir, hagiography and more. The BAMPFA retrospective deliberately expanded the frame beyond that single book. It brought together her early ceramics, documentation of her performances, text-based works, mail art and video art — all, in ARTnews's judgment, elegantly installed.

What does the exhibition actually change?

The show argues for Cha as more than the author of Dictée. Her childhood move from Korea to the United States animated her practice, giving her ground to think through diaspora and life between two cultures. In that space, where words fail to fully explain experience, she made art. The title "Multiple Offerings" borrows from the phrase "Multiple Telling with Multiple Offerings," the conceptual framework that guided her art-making. Her works were not meant to be experienced one way. Cha's practice, as ARTnews puts it, starts a conversation rather than giving easy answers — or even a single one. The viewer is left to pick up the pieces and make meaning.

Sung traced the key moments of a short but productive career: the decade Cha spent as a student at the University of California, Berkeley, which houses BAMPFA, and periods in New York, France and South Korea. At the time of her death, Cha was at work on a major film, White Dust From Mongolia, never fully realized despite completed storyboards and shot footage. Two contemporary artists, Na Mira and Cici Wu, have made work in response to that unfinished film, and those pieces were included in the BAMPFA exhibition. Their presence, ARTnews notes, let Sung make the case for Cha as an artist whose influence has only recently come into focus.

The claim is plausible but worth stating plainly: an artist dead for over four decades is receiving institutional recognition that tracks with a revival of interest, not a discovery. The exhibition documents that shift rather than creating it — a caveat the award text itself does not address.

Who else was nominated?

• Wifredo Lam, for "Wifredo Lam: When I Don't Sleep, I Dream" at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (November 10, 2025–April 11, 2026)
• Tom Lloyd, for "Tom Lloyd" at the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (November 15, 2025–March 22, 2026), traveling to the Frye Art Museum, Seattle (May 16–September 20, 2026)
• Ceija Stojka, for "Ceija Stojka: Making Visible" at The Drawing Center, New York (February 20–June 7, 2026)
• Betty Parsons, for "Betty Parsons: An Expanded World" at CCS Bard's Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York (June 27–October 18, 2026)

The Artists Space run through November 21 gives New York audiences a second window into the survey that secured the prize.