EXILEE AND TEMPS MORTS: Selected Works, by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. Edited by Constance M. Lewallen. University of California Press, 2009, 277 pp., $24.95 (paperback)

Pablo Picasso was a poet and a good one, but it would be a tragedy if his literary work had somehow diverted attention from his achievement as an artist.

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha was an artist and a good one, but it is in no way a tragedy that her book "Dictee" has, to a large extent, eclipsed her artwork. This is not because the artwork is unworthy of attention, but because the experiments with language (and also images) that became "Dictee," a masterpiece of avant-garde autobiography, were not peripheral to her artistic practice but of a piece with it.

Indeed, the more closely one considers Cha's artistic and literary work, the harder it is to tell where one leaves off and the other begins. That her artistic and literary production was a unified project becomes abundantly clear in "Exilee and Temps Morts," a selection of her pre-"Dictee" writing.