Cover ‘Outdoor Piece 1981-82’ (printed in 2000) by Tehching Hsieh (Image: courtesy of M+)
‘Outdoor Piece 1981-82’ (printed in 2000) by Tehching Hsieh (Image: courtesy of M+)
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Taiwanese performance artist Tehching Hsieh’s pieces last anything between one and 13 years—one of these years he spent locked, willingly, in a prison cell—and explore the meaning of time, life and existence
It’s hard to imagine why someone would travel all the way from Taiwan to the US just to be willingly locked up, let alone why he would do it for a year. But performance artist Tehching Hsieh did exactly that: from 1978 to 1979, he was engaged in Cage Piece, a year-long performance during which he sat alone in a cell made of wooden dowels that he built inside his studio.
This is one of the five durational One-Year Performance pieces he created in the 1970s and 1980s, each of which required extreme mental endurance. These bizarre performances, often a comment on the human condition, have made him highly respected; celebrated fellow performance artist Marina Abramović called him “the master” of performance art in 2017, in a conversation between the two that was arranged by the Tate museums.
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Above Portrait of Tehching Hsieh (Photo: courtesy of Hugo Glendinning)
Portrait of Tehching Hsieh (Photo: courtesy of Hugo Glendinning)
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Hsieh hasn’t created anything new since 2000—he vowed not to after completing a 13-year-long piece that ended in 1999. And now, aged 74, he is back in the limelight. On June 1, he was invited by M+ museum to speak at the Asian Avant-Garde Film Festival, where clips and videos of his work were shown. Later this year, he will have his first major retrospective, which opens on October 3 at Dia Beacon museum in New York. The latter came about after he donated 11 of his works, captured in videos, photos and documents, to the museum last year.
“This is the first time that the full materials of all the original documents have been collected by a major museum,” says Adrian Heathfield, the guest curator of Hsieh’s Dia Beacon show, and the author of Out of Now (2008), a monograph on Hsieh’s work. “The show isn’t about restaging his performances. The materials are effectively documented experiences of a previous time, so this is a very different concept in relation to how his [live performance] work lives on,” he says. “To have the original cage, the photographs, the clothes he wore [in a performance] in New York City, his hand-drawn maps and all of these different kinds of documents and materials that are creating the temporality of the atmosphere that can’t be collapsed into an image on Instagram … is really important and powerful.”
Ulanda Blair, the curator of moving images at M+, adds, “We’re living in a time where our attention spans have shrunk. So to have audiences encounter Tehching’s work, and to imagine what it must have been like to have these extreme commitments to durational time-based practice is incredibly subversive—even more so today than it might have been 20, 30 or 40 years ago.”
While the artist’s donation may be primarily responsible for triggering the resurgence of interest in his work, Heathfield says Hsieh has always been timeless and relevant—and both the M+ festival and the Dia exhibition offer another chance to experience his work in a contemporary context. “What is so incredible about his work is his prescience and the way in which his work touches the vital issues and concerns in contemporary life,” Heathfield says. “One [example] would be the issue of freedom and constraint. Cage Piece has a lot to say about the conditions of migrant life and migrant imagination.”
Above 'Cage Piece 1978-79’ (printed in 2000) by Tehching Hsieh (Photo: courtesy of the artist)
'Cage Piece 1978-79’ (printed in 2000) by Tehching Hsieh (Photo: courtesy of the artist)
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Cage Piece was Hsieh’s first performance piece, created four years after he arrived in the US and spun out of his own experience as an immigrant. Hsieh, who grew up in Taiwan, was fascinated with the avant-garde and conceptual art movements happening overseas, but his small southern Taiwan home city of Nanzhou couldn’t provide him with the creative grounds he needed to explore the genre. So, he dropped out of secondary school and joined the navy; in 1974, he jumped ship near Philadelphia and hailed a taxi to New York.
But what he found there it wasn’t the American dream he envisioned. He had no connections in the New York art world and no proper art training, not to mention no legal right to be in the country—a status that lasted 14 years. He did what he could to get by, including working as a dishwasher and construction worker. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he was uninspired. “I couldn’t produce anything. I was very frustrated,” he says. “Until one day, I suddenly realised that the process of thinking and spending time without doing anything is art itself. I [decided to create works that lasted a year], because a year is basically a unit for the calculation of human life and is also the complete circuit of the earth orbiting the sun.”
And so began his performance art journey. In Cage Piece, he locked himself in that prison and relied on a friend to bring him food and daily necessities. The piece was a gesture representing disillusionment and spiritual entrapment. Hsieh says, “I could not write, talk or listen [to anyone] or watch TV for the news. All I did was think to pass the time. I survived by thinking.
While the piece stemmed from his own experiences, Hsieh describes it as a “universal” subject. Heathfield adds: “It questions immigrant life and imagination and the current context in which we find ourselves: in extreme fear and [experiencing] hatred towards other cultures.”
Above ‘Time Clock Piece 1980-1981’ by Tehching Hsieh (Photo: courtesy of the artist)
‘Time Clock Piece 1980-1981’ by Tehching Hsieh (Photo: courtesy of the artist)
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Hsieh’s second work, Time Clock Piece (1980-1981), features the artist punching a mechanical time clock—a device used by businesses to monitor employees’ work hours—every hour for a year. “It’s incredibly prescient in terms of how he understood capitalism and what it was to become in the future,” says Heathfield. “Tehching doesn’t clock onto the labour clock of nine to five. He does it 24/7, and so he understood in the early 1980s that all of life would be, in some way or another, consumed by labour and by the technologies of capture that make life productive.”
Two years later, in Rope Piece, he and fellow performance artist Linda Montano were bound together by a 2.5m rope tied around their waists for an entire year. They explored the ways humans coexist and rely on each other when daily activities like sleeping, cooking and bathing become a constraint and require a negotiation process, especially when the two differ in terms of gender, ethnicity, legal status and personality. The piece spoke to issues such as freedom, privacy, control and commitment.
“People understood this [piece] very intensely in the pandemic, when suddenly many of our lives entered similar conditions of arbitrary restriction,” says Heathfield. “Tehching already put himself [through] this experiment in the late 1970s and 80s. He understood our ability to connect socially and that how we live can change and be constrained.”
Above 'Rope Piece 1983-84’ by Tehching Hsieh and Linda Montano (Photo: courtesy of the artists)
'Rope Piece 1983-84’ by Tehching Hsieh and Linda Montano (Photo: courtesy of the artists)
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As well as highlighting social problems, Hsieh also upended conventional notions of artmaking. In 1985-86, as he was gradually garnering attention in the New York art world, he created his final One-Year Performances, No Art Piece, in which he deliberately disengaged from the art world and avoided reading about, discussing, viewing or creating art. Following that was his final performance: Thirteen-Year Plan (1986-1999). During that time, he made art but didn’t show it publicly and withdrew himself from public attention. Then, on the first day of the new millennium, he made a public statement: “I kept myself alive.”
The artist saw his performances of “inaction” as a new way of looking at life and the meaning of his art: “The [first four] One-Year Performances, which took four years, are the top of the iceberg; No Art Piece and Thirteen- Year Plan, which took way longer, are what’s below the water’s surface. So I’m not just trying to do public art. An iceberg to me isn’t just about what’s visible on top. To see the invisible, you have to go under and [find out for yourself ] what the truth is, [what my artistic path is] and how I survive.”
His emphasis on taking time for internal reflections on art serves as an important reminder in the age of AI. “The speed of AI’s development is unstoppable and is a major challenge that threatens our survival. [Ironically,] our intelligence seems to have the potential to wipe us out,” he says, warning that invention and creativity will disappear if we don’t use the tool wisely.
Using a metaphor that parallels his constant experimentation with time and speed, he leaves the next generation of artists with this piece of advice: “As a living human being with a conscience, one should step on the brake before it’s too late.”
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Zabrina is the Senior Editor, Arts and Culture of Tatler Hong Kong. She specialises in performing arts, visual art and film. Her wanderlust was first fuelled by the Mighty Rovers Antarctica Expedition 2010. Over the years, she has interviewed A-list artists and filmmakers, including Oscar winners Chlóe Zhao and Tim Yip, Golden Horse winner Sylvia Chang, In the Mood for Love cinematographer Christopher Doyle, Pachinko author Min Jin Lee, and Coachella’s first Chinese solo singer Jackson Wang. She won gold at the WAN-IFRA Asian Media Awards for her 2021 feature on the waves of hate crimes targeting Asian Americans.
