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Apparatus: Theresa Hak Kyung and the Politics of Form
- Journal of Asian American Studies
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 8, Number 2, June 2005
- pp. 143-169
- 10.1353/jaas.2005.0038
- Article
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This article questions the widespread notion that the disruption of aesthetic forms by marginal writers necessarily constitutes political resistance. It locates Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's work within the politically ambivalent avant-grade aestheticsÑincluding New Wave film and psychoanalytic film theoryÑexplored in Cha's earlier anthology, Apparatus: Cinematographic Apparatus. Situating Cha's work within its aesthetic contexts demonstrates that it is oppositional not only because its form is unconventional, but also because it responds to an increasingly depoliticized formalism and a problematic notion of a passive subject-viewer in modern/postmodern art and art theory by reasserting the importance of history and human agency.