By the time she graduated Cha had earned many scholastic awards, including a poetry contest prize at the age of fourteen, two years after she started learning English.

[7] Teachers and friends have stated that Cha enjoyed reading broadly, anything from Korean poetry to European modernist and postmodern literature.

[11] Cha worked as a student employee of the Pacific Film Archive for three years between 1974 and 1977 while earning two graduate degrees in art (MA, 1977; MFA, 1978).

"[15] In 1976, Cha decided to pursue a degree in film theory at the UC Education Abroad Program, Centre d'Etudes Americain du Cinema, in Paris.

[7] Her encounter with their theories culminated in her editing an anthology of writings entitled Apparatus/Cinematographic Apparatus: Selected Writings (Tanam Press, 1980), which includes articles by Roland Barthes, Jean-Louis Baudry, Theirry Kuntzel, Christian Metz, Bertrand Augst, and others as well as a piece by Cha herself, a major work based on word deconstruction titled Commentaire.

She had long expressed great anticipation to return in her book Exilée, where she describes the flight in terms of the sixteen time zones that separate San Francisco from Seoul.

Earlier that year, she also traveled to Japan and then back to South Korea, this time working on the film White Dust From Mongolia from May to July 1980 with her brother.

In the body of Cha's art, language functions as fluid binary systems of contemporaneous displacement and reunification, repression and freedom, detachment and engagement, and the ineffable and communication.

"[27] The materiality of the medium, mail, "performs a contingent reticulation of the artist, the artwork, and its recipient, which remain disjointed across an incalculable distance.

Audience distant relative therefore reflects Cha's exploration of the possibilities and limits of communication between sender and receiver as well as subject and object.

According to Hyun Yi Kang, this style causes readers to "[reconsider] the arbitrary and ideologically colored prescriptions on language and writing, challenging the requirements of good speech and correct grammar.

"[29] In Dictée, Cha turns to the structures of Korean religious and social codes as a possible means for centering her displaced identity.

[7] During her time as an usher, Cha became interested in the work of Marguerite Duras, Jean-Luc Godard, Alain Resnais, Yasujirō Ozu, and many other film theorists and artists.

Carl Dreyer was a particularly recurrent influence, particularly his film The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), which was quoted in Cha's super-8 and video installation Exilée (1980) among other instances in her work.

"[36] Cha's performance piece, Reveille Dans la Brume, which was shown at La Mamelle Arts Center in 1977 and the Fort Mason Art Center in San Francisco in 1979, "places the spectator in a viewing situation equivalent to the cinema, where 'the spectator identifies with her/himself, with herself as a pure act of perception: as a condition of the perceived and hence as a kind of transcendental subject anterior to every there is.

"[37] Audiences were distanced from Cha, who was wearing a white robe that was reminiscent of traditional Korean costume, Hanbok, across an opaque, transparent curtain.

"[39] Cha's three-channel video installation, Passages Paysages (1978) is composed of dissolved and faded words, still images, and narration in Korean and English.

The central image of the piece is composed of Cha's childhood photos, the artist's hand, stacks of letters, landscapes, rooms, and an unmade bed.

Cha had received a grant of $3,000 from the National Endowment for the Arts and a $15,000 Chancellor's Postdoctoral Fellowship from the University of California specifically for the film.

They arrived in Korea during a period of political crisis, however martial law was in effect following the assassination of President Park Chung Hee in the previous year.

As Cha and James attempted to film in the streets of Seoul, they were harassed by police for suspicion of being North Korean spies and were finally forced to abandon the project.

[40] Against the backdrop of the historical period of the Japanese occupation of Korea from 1909 to 1945, the unrealized film and book would explore the process of memory at its core, "its philosophical and physiological effect.

Yet in her plan for the novel, Cha emphasizes the historical narrative more and addresses the relationship between identity, language, and exile in the larger context of memory.

[41] In a project outline sketched out by Cha, she highlights the effects of time on memory, a recurring theme across her work, by having two points in time—past and present—happen simultaneously in the narrative.

[21] A posthumous showing of Cha's work was organized by her friend Judith Barry and exhibited at Artists Space a month after her death.

Then 1992 exhibition Mis/Taken Identities, organized by Abigail Solomon Godeau, at the University Art Museum, University of California, Santa Barbara, included Cha's Exilée (1980) and Mouth to Mouth (1975), along with works by Adrian Piper, Carrie Mae Weems, Marlon Riggs, Lorna Simpson, Yong Soon Min, Jimmie Durham, and others.

[53][54] Its catalogue featured essays by Constance Lewallen, Lawrence Rinder, and Trin T. Minh-ha, all providing accounts of the artist's influences, biographical information, the 1970s Bay Area conceptual art scene as well as theoretical analyses focused on language, cognitive analytic theory, and film theories popularize among the 1970s French avant-garde.

Ou, à défaut, invente., at the Bétonsalon [fr])[55] and London (A Portrait in Fragments, sponsored and hosted by The Korean Cultural Centre UK;[56] and with a showing of her films at the Institute of Contemporary Arts)[57][58] in 2013.

[62] A week after her novel Dictée was published, on November 5, 1982, Cha was raped and murdered by Joey Sanza, a security guard at the Puck Building on Lafayette Street in Lower Manhattan.

[29] Additional work left incomplete at the time of her death included another film, a book, a critique of advertising, and a piece on the representation of hands in Western painting.