The One Year Performances are the foundation of Hsieh’s artistic legacy. In “Cage Piece” (1978–79), he lived locked in a wooden cage, deprived of books, writing, radio, television, or conversation for 365 days. In “Time Clock Piece” (1980–81), he punched a time clock every hour, on the hour, casting himself into 12 months of sleeplessness. In “Outdoor Piece” (1981–82), he lived outside, navigating New York’s streets without shelter through the four seasons. In “Rope Piece” (1983–84), created in collaboration with performance artist Linda Montano, the two lived tied to each other by an eight-foot rope with a ban on physical contact for the duration. Finally, in “No Art Piece” (1985–86), Hsieh refrained entirely from making, viewing, reading about, or speaking of art. Each performance was announced through written declarations and accompanied by witness statements verifying their conduct. They were also intensively documented through photography, time cards, maps, films, sound recordings, and other artifacts.
Hsieh described the principle of duration as central: “One year is [the time the] earth [takes to go] around the sun.” By insisting on the span of a year, he rendered his art indistinguishable from his everyday life. As he said, “To do a piece for one week is to separate my art and my life, to feel myself perform. To do [a] piece for one year is to make art my life, [it] is more powerful.” The assertion of the unity of art and life connects Hsieh to broader currents in postwar Conceptual art, while the intensity of his commitment distinguishes him. The written declarations parallel the instruction-based works of Sol LeWitt, and the persistent repetition of daily acts recalls the serial investigations of On Kawara or Hanne Darboven. However, Hsieh differentiated his practice from his contemporaries by refusing spectacle and favoring durational structures that consumed years of his life.
In addition to probing mental and physical limits against the unrelenting passage of time, Hsieh’s works interrogate the constitution of the self under social and political constraints. In “Cage Piece,” the isolation and confinement mirrored the alienation common to immigrant existence. In “Time Clock Piece,” his body was subjected to exhausting labor, doing “the same thing over and over, like a mechanical man.” In “Outdoor Piece,” he confronted survival in extreme precarity and without housing. In “Rope Piece,” he explored the challenges of human relationships: “We become each other’s cage. We struggle because everybody wants to feel freedom.” Montano reflected on how the enforced proximity reshaped their communication; from words, to gestures, and then grunts, “It regressed beautifully.”
This trajectory culminated with “Thirteen Year Plan” (1986–99), in which Hsieh produced work but withheld it from public view from the mid-1980s up to the millennium. He later remarked, “My idea is that time becomes the main thing. . . . It doesn’t matter what I do, I pass time.” Now, the retrospective exhibition he spent years conceptualizing, and has been adapted for Dia Beacon becomes itself a film strip, representing time through the space: “These [exhibition] spaces are ‘art time’; the gaps between the spaces are the intervals between my performances, which I call ‘life time.’” For Hsieh, “The process of passing time itself is the artwork.”
Tehching Hsieh: Lifeworks 1978–1999 is co-curated by Humberto Moro, Dia’s deputy director of program, and Adrian Heathfield, guest curator, with Liv Cuniberti, curatorial assistant.
Tehching Hsieh: Lifeworks 1978–1999 is made possible by major support from the Ministry of Culture, Republic of China, Taiwan. Significant support by Hong Foundation. Generous support by YAGEO Foundation and Jenny Yeh, Winsing Arts Foundation. Public programs made possible by the Taipei Cultural Center in New York.
All exhibitions at Dia are made possible by the Economou Exhibition Fund.
Homepage image: © Bill Jacobson Studio
Installation views: © Bill Jacobson Studio, Molly McKinley, Steven Probert
