He lived in a cage, jumped out of a window and spent a year chained to a friend: Is Tehching Hsieh the most accomplished artist of all time? | Art and design

FOr for one year, beginning September 30, 1978, Ticheng Hsieh lived in a wooden cage measuring 11 feet 6 inches by 9 feet. He was not allowed to talk, read, or consume any media, but a friend would come to him every day with food and remove his waste.

The vital context here is that this imprisonment was voluntary: Hsieh is a Taiwanese-American artist who chose performance art, making long-form “works” for long periods. Marina Abramović called him the “master” of the model. In 1980, seven months after the end of Cage Piece, Hsieh began another year-long work, Time Clock Piece, which required him to punch through a factory-style clock machine in his studio, every hour of every day for 365 days.

Whenever I told people about his work, the response was either admiration or skepticism. 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,” Hsieh says. “This is how I celebrate the passing of time. This is life, and it’s the one thing that makes us all equal. It doesn’t matter if you’re lazy or hardworking, poor or rich, we’re all just passing time.” Hsieh is sitting at the Dia Beacon — the museum affiliated with the Dia Arts Foundation — in upstate New York, where a major retrospective, “LifeWorks: 1978-1999,” will be held three days after it opens.

Hsieh was born in 1950 as one of 15 children in Nanzhou, Taiwan, and never finished school. During mandatory military service in the early 1970s, he began painting, but became interested in performance work. His first stunt was performed in 1973, where he jumped from a second-floor window (breaking both ankles). Taiwan was a conservative society and the United States was the place to continue its practice. In 1974, after taking a job cleaning aboard an oil tanker, Hsieh jumped ship in Philadelphia and made his way to New York.

As an undocumented immigrant who did not speak English, he took cleaning jobs and worked in kitchens. He was an outsider on multiple fronts, but he doesn’t feel that this affected his drift toward performance art. “Literature and philosophy influenced me – Kafka, Dostoyevsky, existentialism… But then I didn’t have a passport or a 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 did the work. I thought I had to go out and look for ideas, but I realized that I could use my body to express things, even though I don’t think my work is autobiographical.”

Drawing would have been an easier route, but Hsieh became interested in and pivoted to conceptual art. He begins to plan the actions for which he will create a concept, define the project with a rule statement, and adhere to it. His first five works took place over the course of one year. The year-long frame reflects the idea of ​​the circle, a life lived in one-year increments around the sun. The word “duration” has been widely used to describe this type of long art, but Hsieh pushes back against the term a bit. “When people use the word ‘duration’ to describe 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 that we all understand.”

Arguably his most challenging project, a year-long performance from 1981-82, involved living abroad for an entire year. He was not allowed to enter any building or vehicle or use a tent. On the day a friend was filming, he was arrested for vagrancy, and in footage with the NYPD, he was shown struggling, screaming, “I can’t get in!” That winter was the coldest of the century in New York. In Zia, a video compilation shows the brutality of it: washing in the Hudson River, sleeping in parking lots, carrying his backpack through deep snow. One wall of the gallery is filled with prints from downtown Manhattan, documenting the routes taken, the fluctuating temperatures, and the sites of defecation.

In person, Hsieh appears elegant and composed. It’s almost pathologically modest, downplaying the hardship and commitment of those one-year projects. He is self-deprecating about the work’s influence and groundbreaking nature and ambivalent about the art world’s praise. “This was the way for me to make art. I enjoyed the freedom – and freedom of thought – that it brought. I had no desire to be rich or successful. Nor did I feel I needed to. So I was never in competition with anyone.”

Sometimes Hsieh takes out his phone to look up something on Google Translate. When talking about the difficulty of performances, he searches for a word he would never want to be described with. The screen says: “Martyr.”

The mainstream art world in New York at the time was largely run by white men. Anyone who is different—including those who make physical performance art like Abramović, Karolyi Schneemann, and Hsieh—often finds themselves outside of it. Hsieh learned to rely on himself, to be true to himself, and to be exposed to the cage and the street. He cites Kafka’s novel The Castle, in which a man struggles to reach a certain world. “Life is not equal for everyone and it can be difficult, but you have to be your own person. I was very stubborn and had to survive.”

Despite his outsider status early in his career, Hsieh does not feel that the actions he took were political. He says the pieces emerged from a personal perspective, even if others detected topical currents. An outsider piece that explored themes of homelessness, cancer, and navigating a city without transportation or the comforts 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 just about passing the time.”

I ask if “Outdoor Piece” is the hardest work he’s done and it’s usually fun. “It’s like being asked about your favorite child, which one do you like best?” The six pieces in the show look like my kids so I can’t say one was harder than the other. “But the work is not masochistic, and it is not about pain, even if others think so.” He likens some performing arts to the equivalent of lying on a single nail, but he believes his own art is more egalitarian, like a bed of nails.

Hsieh’s work can also be seen as a prophecy about the non-stop nature of life, and how it is almost impossible to disappear, unseen or untraceable by technology. It speaks to the hyper-connectivity of modern life and the digital world, and our constant proximity to others. In 1983, for his fourth one-year project, he was attached by an eight-foot rope to fellow artist Linda Montano.

The essence of early performance art is impermanence, but Hsieh was meticulous in documenting what he created. There were daily pictures of the cage piece And tapes of recorded conversations with Montana where they were linked together. One of the showcases at Dia Beacon has a stack of time clocks and 8,760 photographs of Hsieh — one for each punch in the clock — stretching the walls. In the reconstructed wooden cage, the original toothpaste and brush rest on the sink. Seeing his life’s work in one place is stark and poignant.

Hsieh concluded his final thirteen-year show (The Thirteen Year Plan)—making art and not showing it in public—in Greenwich Village on New Year’s Eve 1999, the day he turned forty-nine. He issued a statement resembling a ransom poster (which is on display at Zia) that read: “I have kept myself alive. I have made it past December 31, 1999.”

He is often asked why he stopped his artistic practice, or whether he made any art in the meantime. It makes differentiation. “I never finished or retired, I didn’t do it anymore. I just wanted to do what I wanted to do…and I did that. I’ve been in New York for over 50 years and I feel very comfortable living here, but I still don’t call it home. I think about it as a community, but if people enjoy the work I did here, and I die here, then I accept that.”