{"id":81614,"date":"2025-10-17T22:31:14","date_gmt":"2025-10-17T22:31:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/81614\/"},"modified":"2025-10-17T22:31:14","modified_gmt":"2025-10-17T22:31:14","slug":"tehching-hsieh-4columns","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/81614\/","title":{"rendered":"Tehching Hsieh | 4Columns"},"content":{"rendered":"

\t Tehching Hsieh \t
\n Aruna D\u2019Souza<\/p>\n

A series of one-year performances demonstrate the merging of
art time and life time.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Tehching Hsieh: Lifeworks 1978\u20131999, installation view. Courtesy Dia Art Foundation. Photo: Bill Jacobson Studio. \u00a9 Tehching Hsieh. Pictured: One Year Performance 1978\u20131979 (Cage Piece), 1978\u201379.<\/p>\n

Tehching Hsieh: Lifeworks 1978\u20131999, curated by Humberto Moro and Adrian Heathfield, with Liv Cuniberti, Dia Beacon, 3 Beekman Street, Beacon, New York, on long-term view<\/p>\n

\u2022\u00a0 \u00a0\u2022\u00a0 \u00a0\u2022<\/p>\n

If Tehching Hsieh didn\u2019t exist, we would have to make him up. The novelist Lisa Hsiao Chen recently posted on Instagram a list of books in which the Taiwanese conceptual-slash-performance artist appears as a character, sometimes under his own name, sometimes lightly disguised: Rachel Kushner\u2019s The Flame Throwers, Molly Prentiss\u2019s Tuesday Nights in 1980, Eugene Lim\u2019s Dear Cyborgs, Morgan V\u00f5\u2019s The Selkie, Lisa Ko\u2019s Memory Piece, and, of course, her own spare but sublime account of how time structures a life, Activities of Daily Living.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Tehching Hsieh, performance view of\u00a0One Year Performance 1980\u20131981 (Time Clock Piece), artist\u2019s studio at 111 Hudson Street, 1980\u201381. Courtesy Dia Art Foundation. Photo: Michael Shen. \u00a9 Tehching Hsieh.<\/p>\n

Tehching Hsieh: Lifeworks 1978\u20131999 at Dia Beacon\u2014the artist\u2019s first major exhibition in the US, focusing on six of his longue-dur\u00e9e performances, each installed in its own gallery on the lower level of the museum\u2014offers ample explanation for why he has been such an object of fascination. Hsieh\u2014who literally jumped ship in Delaware and arrived in New York in 1974 without papers\u2014began a series in 1978 that he called One Year Performances. All involved some form of deprivation: locking himself in a cage with no mediation with the outside world (Cage Piece, 1978\u201379); punching a time clock on the hour, 24\/7\/365, which meant he could only leave his apartment for fifty-nine minutes at a time and never get a full night\u2019s sleep (Time Clock Piece, 1980\u201381); living outdoors in Manhattan, with just a sleeping bag allowed for shelter (Outdoor Piece, 1981\u201382); tying himself with an eight-foot-long rope to another performance artist, Linda Montano (Art\/Life, also called Rope Piece, 1983\u201384); refusing to make, see, read, or talk about art (No Art Piece, 1985\u201386).<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Tehching Hsieh, performance view of One Year Performance 1981\u20131982 (Outdoor Piece), New York, 1981\u201382. Courtesy Dia Art Foundation. Photo: Tehching Hsieh. \u00a9 Tehching Hsieh.<\/p>\n

These projects place Hsieh firmly into the context of early 1970s bodily oriented practices\u2014think Chris Burden shooting himself, Vito Acconci masturbating under the false floor of a gallery for hours a day, Marina Abramovi\u0107 and Ulay standing with their hair knotted together until they collapsed from exhaustion. What distinguishes him, however\u2014and here is where I think the fascination arises\u2014is that Hsieh eschewed spectacle almost entirely, and in doing so came to occupy a rarefied space of pure artistic obsession. Instead of making his work in public, he largely relied on showing it after the fact via systematic documentation, which he treated as evidentiary; some of his projects, including the legendary Art\/Life, have never been seen in exhibition until now.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Tehching Hsieh: Lifeworks 1978\u20131999, installation view. Courtesy Dia Art Foundation. Photo: Bill Jacobson Studio. \u00a9 Tehching Hsieh. Pictured: One Year Performance 1985\u20131986 (No Art Piece), 1985\u201386 (detail).<\/p>\n

Hsieh\u2019s One Year Performances all started with a statement, written in the language of a contract, defining the parameters of the piece. He would create a calendar, with dates circled to indicate when people could come to see him perform (usually in his Hudson Street loft, once or twice a month). He set up various legalistic apparatuses to assure any future audience of the veracity and authenticity of his endeavors\u2014for Cage Piece, a lawyer\u2019s statement attests that the signed paper seal placed around the door of the wooden cell was still intact after 365 days; for Time Clock Piece, another witness statement confirms that the signed time cards Hsieh accumulated were real and untampered with. For Art\/Life, a colleague affixed a lead seal inscribed with his signature to the rope to ensure it couldn\u2019t surreptitiously be removed by either party.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Tehching Hsieh: Lifeworks 1978\u20131999, installation view. Courtesy Dia Art Foundation. Photo: Bill Jacobson Studio. \u00a9 Tehching Hsieh. Pictured: One Year Performance 1978\u20131979 (Cage Piece), 1978\u201379 (detail).<\/p>\n

No Art and Tehching Hsieh 1986\u20131999 (Thirteen Year Plan)\u2014the latter involved making work for the period in question that would never be seen by anyone\u2014are documented differently: the curators have placed the statements of intention and calendars with no dates circled in otherwise empty galleries.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Tehching Hsieh: Lifeworks 1978\u20131999, installation view. Courtesy Dia Art Foundation. Photo: Bill Jacobson Studio. \u00a9 Tehching Hsieh. Pictured: Tehching Hsieh 1986\u20131999 (Thirteen Year Plan), 1986\u201399.<\/p>\n

And then there are the more indexical forms of recording. These include the identically shot photographs of his year doing Cage Piece, in which the indication of time passing takes the form of his ever-growing hair, and the prisoner\u2019s countdown of days rudely incised into the cage\u2019s wall (which is reconstructed in the gallery). For Time Clock Piece, we find color pictures of him punching in, a film comprised of single-frame shots of him doing so\u2014a year edited into just six minutes fifty-five seconds\u2014and the time cards themselves. Photographs taken by him and his friends of his days living rough in the city\u2014sleeping, bathing, defecating, and so on\u2014stand in for Outdoor Piece, alongside photocopied maps for each day, red pen notating the different locations he carried out such activities.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Tehching Hsieh and Linda Montano, performance view of Art\/Life One Year Performance 1983\u20131984 (Rope Piece), New York, 1983\u201384. Courtesy Dia Art Foundation. Photo: Tehching Hsieh and Linda Montano, Life Images. \u00a9 Tehching Hsieh and Linda Montano.<\/p>\n

The photos that Hsieh and Montano took as part of Art\/Life are particularly captivating\u2014how could they not be? They go some way to answer lingering questions about how it was possible for two people to remain together for so long: there are pictures of the beds that Hsieh designed and built, close but not too close, and plenty of shots of them lying around, bored. Others show them walking Montano\u2019s dog on a leash or seeing a group of toddlers fastened together with a cord being taken by their teachers to a park\u2014rope pieces in the wild. There are photos of Hsieh undertaking paid carpentry work, while Montano stands quietly below his ladder. And yet, despite this generous documentation, there is a silence, too\u2014the cassette tapes they made of their daily conversations were sealed shut, never to be heard by anyone. Hsieh and Montano have more or less refused to speak about the experience publicly in the forty years since it was made; they broke that reserve during a panel on the opening day of the exhibition, but much remained unsaid. All this evidence only goes so far: we can see what that time looked like, that is to say, but we can never hear what it sounded like, or, even more, feel what it felt like.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Tehching Hsieh: Lifeworks 1978\u20131999, installation view. Courtesy Dia Art Foundation. Photo: Bill Jacobson Studio. \u00a9 Tehching Hsieh. Pictured: Art\/Life One Year Performance 1983\u20131984 (Rope Piece), 1983\u201384.<\/p>\n

In an essay from 1986, Marcia Tucker wrote about a friend who took issue with the ethics of Hsieh\u2019s work: \u201cHe seemed to be making a mockery of the homeless, the incarcerated, those forced to work at jobs which were meaningless to them,\u201d the friend said. Tucker countered that Hsieh\u2019s is \u201ca moral statement about those very issues through extremes of self-discipline, physical hardship, endurance, and danger.\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Tehching Hsieh, performance view of One Year Performance 1981\u20131982 (Outdoor Piece), New York, 1981\u201382. Courtesy Dia Art Foundation. Photo: Claire Fergusson. \u00a9 Tehching Hsieh.<\/p>\n

Of course, it is neither. Hsieh was forever chasing the idea that art time and life time should be coextensive, and he was an undocumented immigrant: the experiences he cultivated were not abstract premises but real risks. In 1978, he did a piece (not in the Dia show) called Wanted by U.S. Immigration Service, a poster complete with photo, biometrics, and fingerprints. It was spurred, he said, by the depression brought on by living underground, in constant fear of detention, unable to make art. In 1982, while he was surviving on the streets for Outdoor Piece, he took part in a show, contributing the following statement: \u201cI shall publish my WANTED poster in the exhibition ILLEGAL AMERICA at Franklin Furnace in New York. If someone should see me, please call the Immigration Service at 212-349-8735.\u201d He was in fact arrested (but not deported) on March 3, 1982, during the course of Outdoor Piece and while Illegal America was on view, not because someone who saw his declaration at Franklin Furnace decided to take him up on the challenge\u2014rather, he was charged with assault with a blunt object for defending himself in an altercation. You can see the arrest record in the documentation of Outdoor Piece at Dia\u2014art and life merging, in the best and worst possible ways.<\/p>\n

Aruna D\u2019Souza<\/a> is a writer and critic based in New York. She contributes to the New York Times, 4Columns, and Hyperallergic. Her new book, Imperfect Solidarities, was published by Floating Opera Press in 2024.<\/p>\n

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