Cliff Notes
Each week, our regional Cliff Notes columnists Hayashi Wilder,Emily Small, Jade Ichimura, and Renée Reizman pick the most exciting events and exhibitions on the West Coast. Read on for this month’s column from Emily.
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha: Multiple Offerings
Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA), Berkeley, CA
January 24 – April 19, 2026
The retrospective of the late Theresa Hak Kyung Cha at BAMPFA spans the institution’s main galleries and contains work from the years she was an undergraduate and then graduate student at UC Berkeley, as well as from her brief time in Paris and New York. Photographs documenting her prolific performance output sit alongside text works that explore the slippery and dominating qualities of language. Hak Kyung Cha had a lasting effect on the landscape of the arts in the greater Bay Area through her Interest in the ways we come to know the world, to relate to each other through our language faculties, and become institutionalized within our places of origin or refuge. It was amazing to see how the show at BAMPFA traces her exhibition history in a range of institutions across the region, collaborating with professors and peers. To continue this practice posthumously, the museum has included works of artists who might be her contemporaries today, such as a film installation by Na Mira.
EX ILÉ E, 1980 is a two-channel video projection that I felt particularly moved by. Made after her first trip home to South Korea in 1979, after moving to the US, a television monitor is embedded in a wall that holds a monumental-sized project. In the projection, curtains slowly blow from the wind of an open window, over what might be a kitchen table. The monitor shows a series of images, like a cup on a table with a long afternoon shadow. Cha’s voice-over meditates on the time and distance between California and South Korea, animating the intimate physical and temporal estrangement of passing between either place.
Reflection: How does language move you?
Barbara Stauffacher Solomon: Garden = Grid = City
Anthony Meier, Mill Valley, CA
January 15 – February 28, 2026
Barbara Stauffacher Solomon was a brilliant observer of the grammar of the world’s construction. At Anthony Meier, a series of her works on paper, a supergraphic, and two canvas Ping-Pong Tables–two of only twelve works she ever made on canvas in her matured practice, and presented at SFMOMA in 1990 as part of Visionary San Francisco–highlight her interest in the utopian significance of a green rectangle, the phenomena of the urban garden, and the tensions between how public and private space is built and maintained. Using the green rectangle as a symbol for paradise, the exhibition pulls from ideas Solomon compiled in a thesis publication titled “Green Architecture and the Agrarian Garden” (1988), following a master’s program that she completed at UC Berkeley in landscape architecture. Her intimate and fantastical drawings that study the grid, perspective, scale, symbol, and accumulation continue throughout the entirety of her career, helping us attune ourselves to wonder about the ordering of things around us.
I am particularly interested in the pieces where she includes text fragments, such as “The walls are for doorways to the fields” in the work Walls Lead to Furrows, 1979. Her poetic phrases hint at the tension between what we perceive as natural and what we register as man-made. I love how this connects to her graphic design, and threads an insistent observance on how society’s structures are created, made to mean, and hold a civic body.
Reflection: What do you perceive as nature within your urban setting? What nature is accessible to you?
Trevor Paglen: The Horizon Waved, and Nothing was Certain: 2006–2026
Jessica Silverman, San Francisco, CA
January 8 – February 28, 2026
In a small retrospective-like compilation of works from the past twenty years, Trevor Paglen presents projects that play with ideas of film and documentary. From cameras that capture satellite patterns in deep space to coat-of-arms-like patches designed by and for special operations in the military, his observational style wanders between conspiratorial and celebratory of the unseen forces that make up our modern world. With a father in the air force, Paglen was a military brat, and as such, has always presented work with the eye of someone who sees our margins first.
Rather than prescribing a superlative or critique onto our relationship with technology, I enjoy how Paglen simply observes our own interests in observation. In a series of smart dye sublimation on aluminum prints that include CLOUD #395, Paglen uses a computer algorithm to inscribe vision analysis atop photographs. Like us, computers see pictures in the clouds. A series of four photographs that document flying saucers from 2025 is also particularly endearing. The question of how he might have captured such images, and whether they are truly extra-terrestrial, is left up to anticipation as the gallery itself insists they are exactly what they look like. Playing with reality, Paglen performs in his work, thus presenting back to us our own built conceptions of how the world is made and what we expect to see from it.
Reflection: How do you literally see the world around you?
—Emily Small