Why Dictee

​Dictée “dictation”, names a critical relationship between language, power, and embodiment. Published in 1982, the same year its author Theresa Hak Kyung Cha was killed, the book has come to occupy a singular position in late twentieth-century experimental practice, challenging the assumption that language functions primarily as expression.

For Korean American artist and gallery owner Tae Ha, Dictée operates as both reference and method. Cha’s work engages histories marked by rupture—colonialism, exile, linguistic displacement—foregrounding the body as the site where these forces are registered. Rather than presenting language as transparent or neutral, Dictée exposes its disciplinary structure: how speech, grammar, and fluency organize subjectivity and determine legibility.

Central to this inquiry is the moment before language coheres—breath, hesitation, murmur, gesture. These pre-linguistic or extra-linguistic forms resist containment, suggesting modes of knowledge that precede and exceed syntax. Cha’s fractured formal strategies—disrupted narratives, interrupted voices, non-linear assemblage—do not illustrate these ideas; they enact them.

For Tae Ha, this approach remains generative. The gallery’s name signals a commitment to practices in which form is not predetermined but emerges from necessity. Works presented at Dictee are understood not as objects that occupy form, but as processes through which form is produced—responsive to histories, bodies, and conditions that cannot be fully stabilized.

While Dictée admits multiple interpretations, its invocation here marks an attention to language as an instrument of power and to art as a site of refusal. The name Dictee gestures toward the tension between discipline and resistance, legibility and opacity—where meaning is not resolved, but continually negotiated.

Intellectual Lineage

• Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Dictée (1982)

• Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks

• Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language

• Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses”

• Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish; The Archaeology of Knowledge