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For one year, beginning on 30 September 1978, Tehching Hsieh lived in an 11ft 6in x 9ft wooden cage. He was not permitted to speak, read or consume any media, but every day a friend visited with food and to remove his waste.
The vital context here is that this incarceration was voluntary: Hsieh is a Taiwanese-American artist whose chosen practice is performance art, undertaking durational “actions” for long periods. Marina Abramović has called him the “master” of the form. In 1980, seven months after the end of Cage Piece, Hsieh began another year-long work, Time Clock Piece, which required him to punch a factory-style clock-in machine in his studio, every hour of each day for 365 days.
Whenever I tell people about his work, the response is either admiration or incredulity. Why would anyone want to subject themselves to this kind of discipline and repetition over such a long period of time? “The kind of art I make is about how I understand the world,” says Hsieh. “It’s how I mark the passing of time. That’s all life is, and it’s the one thing that makes us all equal. It doesn’t matter if you’re lazy or hard-working, poor or rich, we’re all just passing time.” Hsieh is sitting in Dia Beacon – the museum for the Dia Art Foundation – in upstate New York, where a major retrospective, Lifeworks: 1978-1999, is three days from opening.
Born in 1950 as one of 15 children in Nanzhou, Taiwan, Hsieh never finished school. During compulsory military service in the early 1970s, he began painting, but became interested in performance work. Jump, his first action, was performed in 1973 and involved him leaping from a second storey window (he broke both his ankles). Taiwan was a conservative society and the US beckoned as the place to continue his practice. In 1974, after taking a cleaning job on an oil tanker, Hsieh jumped ship in Philadelphia and made his way to New York.
As an undocumented migrant with no English, he took cleaning jobs and worked in kitchens. He was an outsider on multiple fronts, but doesn’t feel this influenced his drift towards performance art. “Literature and philosophy influenced me – Kafka, Dostoevsky, existentialism … but then I had no passport or social security number in America. So I couldn’t apply for grants and had to use my own money. Even when it was difficult, I still made the work. I used to think I had to go out and find ideas, but I realised that I could use my body to express things, even though I don’t think my work is autobiographical.”
Painting would have been an easier path, but Hsieh became interested in conceptual art and pivoted. He began to plan actions for which he would create a concept, outline the project with a statement of rules, and commit to it. His first five works took place over one year; the year-long framework reflects the idea of the circle, a life lived in one year increments around the sun. The word “durational” has been widely used to describe this kind of long-form art, but Hsieh is slightly resistant to the term. “When people use the word ‘durational’ about what I do, I point out that six minutes is also a duration. I was just interested in the idea that one year is a human calculation we all recognise.”
Arguably his most difficult project, One-Year Performance 1981-1982, involved living outside for the whole year. He was not permitted to enter any building, vehicle, or use a tent. On the day a friend happened to be filming, he was arrested for vagrancy and in the footage with NYPD, is shown struggling, shouting: “I cannot go inside!” That winter was the coldest of the century in New York. At Dia, a video of collated clips shows the brutality of it: washing in the Hudson, sleeping in car parks, or carrying his backpack through heavy snow. One gallery wall is lined with printouts of downtown Manhattan, documenting the routes he took, the fluctuating temperatures, the sites of defecation.
In person, Hsieh is compact and neatly dressed. He is almost pathologically modest, playing down the hardship and commitment of those one-year projects. He is self-deprecating about the impact and groundbreaking nature of the work and ambivalent about art world praise. “This was the way for me to make art. I enjoyed the freedom – and freedom of thought – it brought. I had no desire to be rich or successful. I don’t feel I needed it. So I was never in competition with anybody.”
Occasionally Hsieh takes out his phone to look up something on Google translate. When talking about the difficulty of the performances, he searches for a word that he never wanted to be described as. The screen says: “martyr”.
The mainstream New York art world of the time was by and large run by white men. Anyone different, including those making corporeal performance art like Abramović, Carolee Schneemann, and Hsieh – often found themselves outside that. Hsieh learned to rely on himself, to be his own curator, with the cage and street as his gallery. He cites Kafka’s The Castle, in which a man struggles to gain access to a certain world. “Life is not equal for everyone and it can be tough, but you have to be your own character. I was very stubborn and had to survive.”
Despite his outsider status at the beginning of his career, Hsieh doesn’t feel the actions he created were political. The pieces emerged from a personal perspective, he says, even if others detected topical undercurrents. Outdoor Piece explored themes of homelessness, carcerality, navigating a city without transport or the comfort of a home to return to. “People often tell me what they think the work is about, or what they feel are my themes or ideas. It was never about politics – it was always about just passing time.”
I ask if Outdoor Piece was his hardest work to undertake and he is typically droll. “It’s like being asked about a favourite child, ‘Which one do I like more?’ The six pieces in the show are like my children so I can’t say that one was harder than the other. But the work is not masochistic, it’s not about pain, even if other people think that it is.” He likens some performance art to the equivalent of lying on one nail, but thinks of his own as more even, like a bed of nails.
Hsieh’s work can also be seen as a prophecy of the non-stop nature of life, how it is almost impossible to disappear, or to not be seen or traced by technology. It speaks to the hyper connectivity of modern life and the digital world, and of our constant proximity to others. In 1983, for his fourth one-year project, he was tied by an eight-foot rope to fellow artist Linda Montano.
At the core of early performance art is its impermanence and ephemerality, but Hsieh was fastidious in documenting what he made. There were daily photographs of Cage Piece and tapes of recorded conversations with Montana as they were tied together. One vitrine at Dia Beacon houses a pile of the time-clock chads and 8,760 photographs of Hsieh – one for each hourly punch – span the walls. In the reconstructed wooden cage, the original toothpaste and brush sit on a sink. Seeing his life’s work in one place is stark and moving.
Hsieh concluded his final 13-year performance (Thirteen Year Plan) – of making art and not showing it publicly – in Greenwich Village on New Year’s Eve 1999, the day he turned 49. He released a statement that resembled a ransom collage (and is on display in Dia) that states: “I kept myself alive. I passed the Dec 31, 1999.”
He is frequently asked why he stopped his artistic practice, or if he has made any art in the interim. He makes a differentiation. “I never finished or retired, I just don’t do it any more. I only ever wanted to do what I wanted to do … and I did that. I’ve been in New York for over 50 years and I’m very comfortable living here, but I still don’t call it home. I think of it more as a community, but if people enjoy the work I made here, and I die here, I accept that.”
