ARTnews Awards 2026 Historical Artist of the Year: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha

Honoring a deceased artist who is the subject of a major museum survey that offers a new lens with which to examine their work.

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha
for “Theresa Hak Kyung Cha: Multiple Offerings” at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (January 24–April 19, 2026); traveled to Artists Space, New York (September 11–November 21, 2026)
Curators: Victoria Sung, with Tausif Noor

Since her untimely death in 1982, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha has been a touchstone for academics and artists alike. Best known for Dictée, a genre-defying book that combines fiction, memoir, hagiography, and more, Cha was this year the subject of a BAMPFA retrospective that offered a new lens from which to view the artist’s practice. It expanded the scope beyond Dictée and brought together early ceramics, documentation of her performances, text-based works, mail art, and video art, all of which was elegantly installed.

Cha’s experience of moving to the United States from Korea during her childhood animated her practice, giving her fertile ground to think through what it means to live in diaspora and be caught between two cultures. In this space, where words might fail to fully explain one’s experience, she found a place to make art. The exhibition’s title “Multiple Offerings” borrows its names from the phrase “Multiple Telling with Multiple Offerings,” a conceptual framework that guided Cha’s art-making, resulting in works that were not meant to be experienced in just one way. Instead of giving easy answers, or even a single answer, Cha’s practice starts a conversation. We are left to pick up the pieces and make meaning from them.

Curator Victoria Sung traced the important moments of Cha’s short yet productive career, focusing on the decade she spent as a student at the University of California, Berkeley, which houses BAMPFA, and periods spent 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, that she was never able to fully realize, despite having produced storyboards and shot footage for the work. Artists like Na Mira and Cici Wu have looked to White Dust From Mongolia and created work in response to it; those pieces were included in the BAMPFA exhibition. With their inclusion, Sung also made the case for Cha as an artist whose influence has recently come into focus.

Nominees:

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); traveled 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)

Read more about the 2026 ARTnews Awards.