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From Alchemist to Diseuse
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's mail-art piece Audience Distant Relative (1977) materializes her nascent concern with the artwork's ability to institute aleatory relations among the work, the artist, and the audience and to disarticulate their putative sense of ipseity.1 Predating Cha's more wellknown works such as Dictée and Exilée (both made in 1980), which embrace written inscriptions and postal addresses initiated by such inscriptions, the work performs a contingent reticulation of the artist, the artwork, and its recipient, which remain disjointed across an incalculable distance. Placed within the multiple envelopes, the work's text addresses the audience as its "distant relative" and solicits each of them to become a corecipient of the letter's enigmatic materiality:
I address you
As I would a distant relative
As if a distant relative
Seen only heard only through someone else's description.2
By showing a condensed overlap of meaning between a relative who is distant and a distance that is relativized by the letter's missive movement, Cha's "address" questions normative notions of both "relative" and "distance" and enacts a poiesis of relation between the two heretofore estranged entities whose sensuous faculties only partially and incompletely apprehend each other. Here, the work's limited capacity to "see only" and "hear only" the unknown audience's presence corresponds with the audience's own similarly incomplete synesthesia, which, without fully comprehending the object, disperses its significance across senses. As the following passage indicates, despite the kind of intimacy usually associated with the second-person pronoun "you," the audience's relation to the work is torn between her sighting of the inscriptions and her hearing of their potential sounds: "upon opening it / you hear the sender's voice as your eyes move over the / words. You, the receiver, seeing the sender's image / speak over the / voice."3 Audience Distant Relative thus illuminates multiple senses that are involved in one's encounter with the sensible material and foregrounds its own aesthetic transmission as a process that transforms both the transmitted matter and the audience's sentient body.
In her MFA thesis "Paths," Cha further defines the artist's task as one of producing "an alchemical path" upon which the material in the world and the audience that receives it can be altered:
Alchemical elements used by Alchemists could be...