Theresa Hak Kyung Cha speaks of how, under the rule of those who seek to steal language, the people of colonized Joseon still sang like birds.
She speaks of a woman without a language of her own ㅡ of how she can write everything without writing anything at all.
Such writing, she says, cannot be read in the light.
To read Dictee, then, is to follow a woman's voice into the dark.

Cha's woman tries to give bodies to voices ㅡ
so that the stories of history are not left behind as pages of a finished past,
but kept alive, here and now, flowing.

Instead of repairing the broken history into a flawless tale,
the woman writes in the form of patchwork ㅡ exposing the damage itself.
Instead of narrating history with yet another single voice,
she tries to return the voices erased from within history to those they belonged to.

That is why Dictee is not a book of visible text, but a book of voices ㅡ meant to be read aloud. Through her reading performance, writer Jang Hye Ryeong seeks to convey what it means to see what cannot be seen, to hear what has not been heard.

From the streets of 2025, can we see the streets of 1979, of 1960?
Can we hear those voices?

And if we canㅡ
can we answer them?