The Korean Cultural Center Washington, D.C. (KCCDC) has partnered with the Corcoran School of the Arts and Design and IAA at Hillyer to present "Écriture with the Body: Contemporary Korean Women's Art," a groundbreaking multi-venue touring exhibition. The exhibition features works by 18 Korean and Korean American women artists who use writing, language, and text-based practices as powerful tools for expressing subjectivity and challenging entrenched gender and racial inequalities.
Rooted in artistic traditions historically shaped by patriarchy but often challenged by women—including calligraphy (서예, seoye), classical poetry (한시, hansi), and literati painting (문인화, muninhwa)—the exhibition reclaims these art forms through an embodied feminist perspective. The artists transform writing from a mere communication tool into a visceral assertion of presence, memory, and identity. By incorporating bodily expressions into text, they create transformative experiences that question formal conventions and forge empowering narratives within historically patriarchal artistic traditions.
The collaborative exhibition spans three venues and explores four interconnected themes. At the KCCDC, the focus centers on artists paying homage to visionary Korean American artist and filmmaker Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (1951-1982), expanding on themes central to her practice. Artists Kim Oksun, Ahn Okhyun, Yoon Jeongmee, and Jaye Rhee present collaborative digital performances that re-read and re-imagine Cha's posthumous book "Dictée." Through media art, photography, and installation, these artists challenge structural logics of language and culture while interrogating embedded hierarchies.
Drawing from embodied, diasporic, and feminist experiences, the featured artists disrupt fixed systems of meaning and propose new visual and textual grammars. Their practices reimagine "écriture" (the French word for writing) as fragmented, hybrid, and open-ended—resisting assimilation while opening space for multiplicity, uncertainty, and radical subjectivity. The exhibition gathers these diverse artistic practices into a collective exploration of how writing and the body intersect as tools of empowerment.
The exhibition is organized into four thematic sections across the three venues. "Challenging Tradition: Contemporary Literati Painting and Calligraphy" reinterprets traditional aesthetics through a contemporary feminist lens. "Disturbing Language: Art and Women's Poetry" explores the intersection of visual art and women's poetry as sites of transformation. "Writing with the Body: Performance and Documentation" transforms the body into both medium and message of resistance. "Reimagining Écriture: The Legacy of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha" collectively reimagines Cha's legacy by engaging with language's structural logic and embedded hierarchies.
Featured artist Kim Oksun has spent over two decades focusing on marginal people and landscapes existing between displacement and settlement. Having relocated to Jeju Island, she captures genre photographs documenting outsiders' lives while recording non-native plant species that have taken root in unfamiliar soil. Kim has received major Korean photography awards, including the 2007 Park Geonhi Cultural Foundation Photography Award and the 2017 Ilwoo Photography Award, with exhibitions at MoMA PS1, Houston Museum of Art, and major Korean institutions.
Ahn Okhyun explores individual and collective consciousness through photography and video, examining shared emotional states. She has held twelve solo exhibitions across Seoul, New York, and Stockholm, and co-organized "Chorus Dictée: Chorus," reinterpreting Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's work "Dictée." Photographer Yoon Jeongmee documents childhood through cultural anthropological and gendered lenses, utilizing socially assigned color codes in works like "The Pink and Blue Project." Her photographs have graced covers of LIFE magazine, The New York Times, and National Geographic.
Jaye Rhee explores ruptures between sounds and images from different historical moments, employing photography, video, and performance to present new poetic realities that blend factual immediacy with dreamlike imagination. Her recent work facilitates encounters between Eastern and Western women whose voices were historically marginalized. Rhee's work has been exhibited at prestigious venues including the High Museum of Art, MCA Denver, and Mori Art Museum.
The late Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, who died at age 31 in 1982, created a rich body of conceptual art exploring displacement and loss through various media including performance, video, film, and installation. Her exploration of exile and dislocation was informed by her family's immigration to America in 1962 during the Korean War, moving from Korea to Hawaii and then San Francisco before settling in New York City in 1980.
Curated by Dr. Jung-Sil Lee and Dr. Koh Dong-Yeon of Trio & Beats, the exhibition is organized by the Korean Foundation for International Cultural Exchange (KOFICE) with support from Korea's Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism. The exhibition runs from October 3 through November 12, 2025, at the KCCDC, with an artist and curator talk scheduled for October 2. Additional venues include the Corcoran School of the Arts and Design (October 3 - November 15) and IAA at Hillyer (October 3 - November 2), with admission free at all participating venues though hours vary by location.
