T’s Art issue looks at the iconoclastic artists who have found power in saying no.
On the street, two big-shouldered N.Y.P.D. officers, one Black, one white, are arguing with an Asian man on the sidewalk. It looks like the 1970s — the man’s got a Bowie-like haircut and he’s wearing a black turtleneck. The cops begin to manhandle him. He wails, saying that he doesn’t want to go inside the police station and sounding as if that would be a worse fate than any pain the police might inflict. The cops haul him through a green door anyway.
The scene is from footage documenting Tehching Hsieh’s “Outdoor Piece,” a yearlong performance project created 43 years ago, when he was 30. It is one of six artworks, or as Hsieh calls them, “lifeworks,” that will comprise a single installation opening at the upstate New York museum Dia Beacon in October 2025. Hsieh’s premise for the work, like for much of his work from this era, was simple in theory, though in practice it required remarkable feats of endurance: He would spend twelve months outside, never going indoors.
While planning the performance, Hsieh worked with an attorney to craft a quasi-legal framework to define the conditions of the piece.
I, Tehching Hsieh, plan to do a one year performance piece.
I shall stay OUTDOORS for one year, never go inside.
I shall not go in to a building, subway, train, car, airplane, ship, cave, tent.
I shall have a sleeping bag.
The performance shall begin on September 26, 1981 at 2 P.M. and continue until September 26, 1982 at 2 P.M.
-Tehching Hsieh
New York City
When he was arrested on May 3, 1982, the artist had already survived one of the coldest New York winters on record. That morning, he was drinking tea on the stoop of a building at Hubert and West streets in TriBeCa. A man emerged from the building and asked him to move. Hsieh said he would when he’d finished the tea. The man hit him with a metal club; Hsieh took out a nunchaku and fought back. The assailant reported Hsieh’s defense as an attack, and the cops arrested Hsieh, resulting in 15 hours of jail time.
The time in jail was the only time he broke the rules. When Hsieh was brought before a judge, in part for possessing an illegal weapon, his lawyer fought for him to stay outside the courthouse, to which the judge, who’d read an article in The Wall Street Journal on Hsieh’s work, agreed. “I don’t see any reason to bring him indoors,” he said. “These days anything is art. Staying outside may be art. I’m getting old and nothing surprises me.” He ruled Hsieh guilty of disorderly conduct; the sentence was “time served.”
Hsieh is now 73 years old. The Taiwan-born artist, who’s made his home in New York City for 50 years, is compact, energetic and could be 20 years younger. He greets me at his building in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, in the artist’s uniform of a black T-shirt and jeans.
Hsieh, who’s made his living in construction and renovated his own house by hand, feels his body getting less strong. He says that the central theme of his art is the movement of time. “Life is a life sentence” and “life is passing time” are two of the ideas driving everything he’s created. In addition to “Outdoor Piece,” the central works of his career, which lasted for 21 years from 1978 to 1999, are all concerned in some way with these themes. There’s “Cage Piece” (1978-79), in which Hsieh spent one year living in a cage inside a TriBeCa loft he could afford by renting out studios to three other artists; “Time Clock Piece” (1980-81), in which Hsieh was free to go wherever he wanted but had to be back at his studio each hour to punch the clock; “Rope Piece” (1983-84), in which Hsieh connected himself by an 8-foot-long rope to another artist, Linda Montano, for a year, even while they slept in separate beds and while in the bathroom (the two signed an agreement never to touch each other); “Year of No Art” (1985-86), for which Hsieh stated: “I will not do ART, not talk ART, not see ART, not read ART, not go to ART gallery and ART museum for one year”; and finally Hsieh’s “Thirteen Year Plan” (1986-99) to make art and not show it publicly, from his 36th birthday on December 31, 1986, until his 49th birthday, which was the last day of 1999.
Sitting in his spare, clean, gray office with framed documents from his works on the wall — off a central room featuring a duplicate of the famous time clock (the original is now in Dia’s collection) — I ask how he came up with the idea for his first durational work, the “Cage Piece.” Hsieh opens his computer browser to the first scene of Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey,” (1968) where an early human-primate, after consulting a mysterious black monolith, uses a bone to kill an animal. Triumphantly, the hunter throws the bone into the air where it iconically transforms into a spaceship.
Just as the significance of the monolith is never explained in the film, Hsieh describes his own work as being like an empty can or a time container. There’s a discernible form — a man sits alone in a cage and scratches a mark on the wall for each day that time passes. While Hsieh doesn’t frame his work within the language of politics, biography, theory or spirituality, he wants any and all of these things to be present for whomever encounters the pieces. “I do the work, and you do the thinking,” he says.
Hsieh speaks about “art time” and “life time” as spheres of existence that are both separate and joined. His metaphor for art time and life time is a ship passing through the Panama Canal, how the levels of the Canal must adjust and equalize for the ship to move. While this metaphor may resonate for anyone who’s juggled the demands of immigration, or managed art and a day job, or navigated parenting and working (or remembers that ship stuck in the Suez Canal during the pandemic), he dissolved the boundaries between art making and living in ways that are possibly unprecedented. His work, he feels, is really not about performance as we generally characterize that word. “I’m no actor,” he says. “I just [use] real nature. I use real time. That is my character.”
Two of his central influences are not artists but the writers Dostoyevsky and Kafka. Like their novels, he says, his work is “talking about what life means. Time and being.” (In December, “Access Kafka,” an exhibition at Berlin’s Jewish Museum about relationships between Kafka’s work and contemporary art, will include Hsieh.) But, he tells me, he could never be a writer himself. Even after 50 years in New York, longer than he was ever in Taiwan, “my English is bad,” he says. “When I do the ‘Outdoor Piece,’” he continues, “my friend told me in the beginning, oh you have plenty of time to live in the outdoors, why not learn your English? I say I don’t want to learn, then he [asks me], ‘What do you want to do?’ I say, ‘I’m wasting time. I’m good for wasting time.’” Hsieh suggests that his problem with English may not even be about fluency, but about the limitations of language itself. With a glint in his eye he shares, “Some people say my English is better than my Chinese!”
Wall Street Journal articles aside, he’s aware of not having received much recognition as an artist during the time he was working. The art and film critic Carrie Rickey has noted that the early 1980s was a period when “exclusion was commonplace and marginalized artists were not part of the conversation.” Hsieh’s art is impossible to collect and hard to exhibit, yet he was the first performance artist to have an exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art and his works have been seen at London’s Tate, the Venice Biennale and elsewhere. But those exhibitions haven’t been frequent, and the institutions usually focus on a single “One Year Performance,” not on his entire body of work. I ask if being American, being white, being a U.S. citizen, in other words resembling more closely the people whom the art world paid the most attention to in the late ’70s and early ’80s would have won him more support. He makes the point that those people whom the art world favored didn’t do that kind of work.
Hsieh was driven by an inner purpose that he himself doesn’t associate with particular art movements like Minimalism or Body Art. “This kind of work,” he tells me, “is a sacrifice.” It’s difficult to understand in light of American materialism and optimism. “More like Russian culture,” he says. He references the Soviet-era filmmaker and exile Andrei Tarkovsky, particularly his 1979 film “Stalker,” in which a tour guide leads people through a landscape called “the zone” where an unspecified disaster has produced strange gaps in the laws of space, time, and physics.
Hsieh meticulously documented everything. Dia Beacon has also acquired over 1600 objects from his archive, currently housed in giant wooden crates, including, for “Time Clock Piece,” the faux worker’s uniform Hsieh wore for each frame of a six-minute-long 16 mm stop-motion film, comprising the 8,627 single frames he shot each time he punched the clock. (Hsieh missed his punch 133 times; each time he documented why.) From “Outdoor Piece,” there’s a series of haunting black-and-white photographs, self-portraits in urban landscapes, as well as a map in which Hsieh used a red pen to record the high and low temperature, and the places he walked, ate, slept, defecated, and — in winter — made a fire. But the documentation was never meant, as another artist might have it, to be exhibited or collected: It was envisioned as a “trace” of an action happening in real time. Humberto Moro, a curator at Dia, and Adrian Heathfield, who co-wrote a 2009 monograph on Hsieh’s work, are co-curating the Dia installation along with Hsieh; they say that Hsieh documented the “One Year Performances” with such precision and care because he knew if he didn’t, no one would believe he’d done the work.
HSIEH GREW UP the 12th of 15 children in Taiwan, the son of a prosperous father, Hsieh Ching, whose occupations included businessman, farmer and county councilor. Hsieh’s mother, Hung Su-Chiung, was his father’s fifth wife. She worked as a midwife before marrying. Hsieh describes her as someone who held the family together and was called “mother” even by his siblings who were older than her. She was a devout Christian, and Hsieh, in naming his key influences, always hones in on her qualities of dedication and sacrifice. The family lived on a farm, where workers cultivated rice and fruit, raised pigs and cows. His father was 55 the year he was born. “More like a grandfather,” Hsieh says. He also owned the local cinema, so the family saw a lot of movies.
In an artist talk from 2019, Hsieh shows a slide of visiting his mother in Taiwan not long before her death. (She died in 2017 at age 98.) He reclines on a bed and she’s in a chair pointing with her finger. “The angle, the way I lay down, you know the way she [points her] finger to me … she is trying to do like that,” and then he switches to an image of Michelangelo’s “The Creation of Adam,” that very iconic hand gesture between creator and the first man. Hsieh tells the students how his mother frequently asked if he went to church. “I always say, ‘yes, yes’ — but I don’t do religion.” (The roomful of M.F.A. students erupts into laughter.)
At age 19, Hsieh began serving a required three-year army stint, half of which he spent on Nangan island, 120 miles from Taipei and just 10 from mainland China. Hsieh describes it as “the front line” between the two powers. He did clerical work and delivered newspapers; in his off hours, he painted, making his way through a number of styles. Despite his obvious talent, painting didn’t suit Hsieh’s sensibility.
A friend had told him that, in the West, there were art events called “happenings,” but never said what they were. Imagining what that meant led to Hsieh’s first serious attempt at performance: “Jump Piece” (1973), in which he jumped out of a second-story window. He broke both ankles, requiring a series of surgeries, and still suffers the consequences of the fall. Hsieh destroyed the film footage of the event but years later found black-and-white photos taken by one of his brothers in which we see a young man leaping, crumpling to the ground, then sitting up clasping his ankles. It’s a rough document of a rougher action by a 23-year-old artist searching for a language. Hsieh now calls “Jump Piece” “bad art,” but Moro considers it “like a Rosetta Stone … to decode everything that happens later.”
In 1974, rejecting a Taiwanese art world that felt stagnant and conservative, Hsieh left Taiwan on an oil tanker. His job was cleaning the engine, a dirty job at the lowest rung of the ship’s hierarchy. Two months later, in Philadelphia, Hsieh walked off the job and took a $4 Trailways bus plus a $150 taxi to New York. He worked as a cleaner, dishwasher, construction worker. He spent four years getting situated before making the works that established his reputation as an artist.
The conception and execution of his first yearlong work in New York, “Cage Piece,” came from an attempt “to find your form,” he says. Life itself would be his medium, including following an idiosyncratic set of rules for how to navigate the passage of time and how to occupy space. He chose a year, as it’s both a cosmic unit (one revolution of the Earth around the Sun) and a human unit of time (one more birthday, New Years, Fourth of July). For “Cage Piece” he would spend the year inside a container constructed out of pine dowels and two-by-fours. It measured 11.5 by 9 by 8 feet; inside were a bed, blanket, sink and pail. His signed statement read, “I shall NOT converse, read, write, listen to the radio or watch television, until I unseal myself on September 29, 1979.”
On every day of “Cage Piece,” a friend, Cheng Wei Kuong, brought Hsieh a roast beef sandwich and removed the artist’s waste. Hsieh acknowledges that Cheng’s visits made “Cage Piece” possible. Hsieh also makes a point of telling me that the TriBeCa loft housing the cage was close to Cheng’s work in Chinatown. Hsieh thinks people, particularly Western people, can read too much into Cheng’s commitment, assuming only a very good friend — or even a lover — would offer this kind of support. Hsieh says Americans don’t always understand how sacrifice and dedication infuse Chinese culture and friendships. Hsieh and Cheng came from the same small town in Taiwan and they shared a painting tutor. Plus, Cheng was a bit grumpy about the whole thing, which worked perfectly with the mood of the piece, being trapped and isolated. Cheng now lives in California, but the two men are still close.
Like the works that followed it, creating “Cage Piece” included engaging an attorney to confirm in a written statement that the bars on Hsieh’s cage were sealed and that the seals remained unbroken at the piece’s end. To mentally survive, he imagined the corner of the cell with his bed was “home,” and the three other corners were “outside,” so he could “go out for a walk,” which “made the cage feel bigger.” Over the course of the year, there were hours when visitors were allowed into the loft to observe. Once, a woman came in and asked Hsieh where the work was.
WHILE ALL OF Hsieh’s “One Year Performances” depended on collaborators, only one of his works involved an actual performance partner. Between July 4, 1983, and July 4, 1984, Hsieh and Montano spent an entire year together, connected by an 8-foot-long rope tied around each of their waists. (“Why July 4?” I ask Hsieh. So they could cut the rope on Independence Day.) Every day they’d trade off who would take a photograph: The pictures reveal the two of them roped naked, roped half-clothed, roped with Montano’s dog, roped with her family from upstate, roped at a construction job (“Two people, one salary,” jokes Hsieh), roped at the bank in front of matching ATMs. In one photo, a gaggle of four-year-olds walk by, also holding a rope.
He and Montano were very different people. (Though if they had been more similar, would it have been that much easier to do this for 12 months?) Aspects of her spirituality — astrologers, meditation, paganism — were not a good fit for Hsieh. But when I talk with Montano, who’s done decades of serious study of Zen, Indian spirituality and Catholicism, she says all that proximity to Hsieh and his third chakra (the energy center that radiates power) was a lot to live with. Montano, who had previously created performances about sensory deprivation, and made a powerful video about her husband’s sudden death in a gun accident, relates that the scariest moment was when Hsieh got in an elevator and the door closed, with her still attached to the rope on the other side. Hsieh pressed the “open” button and averted — who knows what, but it might not have ended well. After that, she kept having elevator nightmares, so Hsieh proposed an antidote: a ride over the Brooklyn Bridge (two bikes, and a rope between them), which Montano describes as “stupidly euphoric.” Hsieh says he and Montano may or may not have liked or respected each other during that year, but they never cut the rope. They finished the piece.
The collaboration made a deep impression on Montano. Despite conflicts during their year of umbilical living, she says, 42 years later, “he has an extremely sweet heart. I called him the other day. And I was telling him this and that, and he said, ‘Oh, you need some money, Linda?’ Or, ‘Make sure you eat.’” In 1984, Hsieh told Artforum that his three years of military service prepared him for the “One Year” pieces, and indeed, the generation of performance artists now in their 70s and 80s can sound like soldiers whose trench time bonded them for life. Marina Abramović, the most famous of this cohort, met Hsieh in 1984, at the rope-cutting event, and they’ve been good friends since. Abramović, who worked with her then-partner, Ulay, on many performances addressing the nature of love and attachment during this same period, says about Hsieh and Montano that “they didn’t even love each other. They actually hated each other.” The work with Montano wasn’t about love. According to Hsieh, it was about “life tied with another person.”
Although none of the “One Year Performances” were as physically damaging as “Jump Piece,” making them could be dangerous. Perhaps not coincidentally, all of Hsieh’s durational works were created during the 14 years he was undocumented. (Hsieh prefers the outdated, and often pejorative, term “illegal.”) The judge who heard Hsieh’s case during “Outdoor Piece” either didn’t know or chose to ignore Hsieh’s immigration status. “You have to understand the risk that he’s taking,” says Heathfield. He was “assaulted in a manner it’s very hard to believe was not motivated by race, and then pursued by the person who assaulted him and thrown in jail. It could very easily have been the end, not only of the piece, but of his life in America. And of course, the crazy thing about it all is that [in the footage by the late filmmaker Robert Attanasio] all Tehching cares about is not going inside. He only cares about the art.”
The pieces — both their forms and their intensity — were driven in part by an experience of having performed various kinds of hard and underpaid labor reserved for immigrants, and by the real risks of imprisonment or deportation. Hsieh points out that unlike immigrants who faced extreme poverty, or who left countries too politically dangerous or economically lean to return to, Hsieh enjoyed some financial assistance from his family as well as the knowledge that should he be deported, he’d be safe. But New York was his chosen home, the city he calls, wryly, “my best cage.”
Aside from his arrest during the “Outdoor Piece,” Hsieh says that for the most part, during those years of being undocumented and making art, he wasn’t afraid. Making art gave him confidence. Still, when he was sleep-deprived from punching the time clock every hour, he’d fall into dreams of being deported and having to sneak back into the U.S. through Mexico. Immigration itself is an ordeal — it’s the human ordeal on which so much of our economy turns — and the ordeal of Hsieh’s art was clearly influenced by it.
Ryan Lee Wong, a novelist, curator and Zen Buddhist who is the son of a fifth-generation Chinese American father and a Korean immigrant mother, sees in Hsieh’s work “the loneliness and dislocation of migration. The feeling of being literally an alien on these shores. And not knowing how to enter society or if society will have you.” He tells me, “When I look at Hsieh’s work, here’s someone who is pointing to, and who has lived these very austere practices that shake up something in every person who encounters them, and forces us to ask a question of ourselves, which is essentially: What is a good life? And where does freedom cross into constriction and constriction actually allow for freedom?”
THERE IS A younger generation, including Wong, who view knowing about Hsieh’s works as “a badge, a lodestar” and who, even though they weren’t around to witness the actual works, see poetry in them. For Hsieh himself, the physical and mental toughness it took to embody a series of constraints through which to consider time and being no doubt took a toll. Hsieh admits that when he’d complete a piece with particular physical challenges, like the sleep deprivation of the “Time Clock Piece,” or the constant exposure to the elements of the “Outdoor Piece,” “not to do art was another kind of freedom.”
The final two pieces included in the Dia installation are ones Moro, the show’s co-curator, calls works of “refusal” or “removal,” although what is being refused and what is being affirmed are part of their mystery and strength. The first was the “Year of No Art” (1985-86). For the next, “Thirteen Year Plan” (1986-99), he declared, “I will make ART during this time. I will not show it PUBLICLY.” If Hsieh did (as he promised he would) make art in the 13 years between 1986 and 1999, he succeeded, to this day, in never showing it. During that period, he tried to disappear — from the art world, from New York, from everything he’d ever known. He moved to Seattle for a time, a hardscrabble period resembling his early days in New York. The disappearance-within-a-disappearance failed; he returned to New York after a year and a half. On New Year’s Eve 1999, his last birthday of the century, he held a press conference at Judson Memorial Church, where he shared a ransom-note-style statement, “I kept myself alive,” and stepped out into the rest of his life.
Then Hsieh stopped making art altogether.
He points out that his wish to disappear was not unlike that of Kafka, whose will stipulated his unpublished works should be burned (though Kafka’s literary executor preserved the books anyway, as Kafka had to have known he would). Perhaps similarly, Hsieh ultimately feels that his work “needs witnesses.”
Hsieh doesn’t call what he’s doing retirement; he calls it a shift from art time to life time. At first, he feared people wouldn’t respect him. Now that doesn’t bother him. For the 2025 Dia exhibition, which will run for two years, the museum is giving him the freedom to design and implement a presentation of his “lifeworks” that’s been almost 20 years in the making; it is, in a sense, the creation of a new work.
Most of us live waiting for something. For artists, it’s often will they get a grant or other sources of funding? Will the gallery show their work? What does the agent or publisher think? And how do they compare themselves to other artists. “I’m not that kind of artist,” Hsieh says. “I already do what I do. I’m not asking you [to] give me something.” As a fellow Brooklyn artist doing the documentary-film-world version of a durational work (creating an essay film that’s taking years to complete) I’m attentive to Hsieh’s not-working as an active choice. When someone who’s made work that influenced the world feels just fine not working, I feel something complex, somewhere between deep curiosity and cautious envy. Hsieh’s “No art, no problem,” and his avowed lack of interest in fame and in striving on others’ terms is atypical.
When I say to Hsieh, for someone who doesn’t like religion, your work is awfully monklike, he responds that I’m not the first to point this out. But Hsieh’s final renunciation of an art practice that itself resembled a shifting series of renunciations feels infused with something wry and strange. He “did time” (to borrow his phrase) and got away with playing an art game that insisted, in a radical manner, that art mustn’t be restricted to galleries, collectors or museums. Forty years after the rope-cutting ceremony at which the composer Pauline Oliveros (Montano’s ex), wearing a sleeveless T-shirt and jeans, opened a utility knife and sawed through the rope around Hsieh’s waist, a respected institution is acknowledging his entire body of work.
As he prepares for the Dia show, a U-shaped journey through space and time that will juxtapose rooms full of imagery and motion with far emptier passages, Hsieh envisions his work being embraced by new generations. “Still many people,” he says, “don’t know my work.” He adds, “I’m living a low-key life” and “it’s not my personality to be public.” And yet he’s also an artist whose work has taken him closer to “public” life (on the street in all weathers; connected by a rope to another person for a year) than many artists. He owns that doing construction work gave him freedom, and he’s OK that there are people who “don’t know I’m an artist. They know me as a construction worker.” And he laughs. As un-self-important as he is, Hsieh is also aware of the power of his vision.
Dostoyevsky, Kafka and his Christian mom keep coming up, so I ask Hsieh, on a scale where nihilism is at one end, and moral and ethical systems like Christianity and Confucianism occupy the other, where is he? Hsieh says he’s more like Raskolnikov from Dostoyevsky’s “Crime and Punishment,” who killed a woman he deemed worthless and evil, justifying her murder to promote a greater good. Hsieh’s obviously no killer but, like Raskolnikov, he’s considering how, in a godless world, maybe you can do anything and everything. Moro posits that the scale is not linear but rather a circle, with Hsieh’s work falling at the place where nihilism and morality meet. That’s where he punches the time clock or sits in a cage. “These works are about both nothing matters,” Moro says, “and about everything matters so much.”
Hsieh tells me that he wants the actions and forms that define his works to turn things upside down, to reveal different angles or aspects of human life. It’s difficult work because at heart it gets at all the ways the world needs to be smashed into pieces if we’re to avoid sleepwalking through our time. In the West, Hsieh points out, “time is money. Time is expensive.” Co-curator Heathfield feels that in documenting each hour of an entire year, Hsieh foreshadowed the way we live now, anticipating how “all of the technologies of visibility and of production will get under our skin, will capture our bodies, not 9 to 5 in the old form of labor, but 24/7; every part of life will be turned into a form of productive labor.”
HSIEH HAS BEEN married three times. All of the relationships occurred after the “One Year” pieces were done, in part because he thought that it would be too much to expect a spouse to either help out or wait around. He’s good friends with his most recent ex-wife, Qinqin Li; they ran a cafe, the Market, together in Clinton Hill. It opened in 2015 and was popular with Pratt students, as well as with people who knew who Hsieh was but were often too shy to start a conversation with him as he bused tables. The restaurant closed in 2021.
During our third conversation we are eating outside. The light changes from magic hour to deep summer blue, and Hsieh reminds me how, with his performances, there’s nothing to see. He paraphrases the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s quote, “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” It’s from the book “Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus,” which explains: “In order to draw a limit to thinking we should … be able to think what cannot be thought.” For Hsieh, the quote suggests that “art has its own life and can speak for itself.” One of his own philosophies is: “Life is freethinking.” Hsieh doesn’t mean that everyone should read Wittgenstein, or care about art, but rather his worldview suggests that having (and keeping) access to our minds is not a given.
In his office, Hsieh shares a video that his ex-wife recorded as they were about to open their restaurant. Hsieh, wearing a paint-spattered zip-up sweatshirt, paint-spattered jeans, work boots and a blue hat with black tabs that pop out like ears, dances in the restaurant to the song “Amiret El Sahara” by the Egyptian percussionist Hossam Ramzy. His arms fly up and around, his feet kick forward and back in an unfixed pattern, and as the drumming gets faster, so does Hsieh. He throws his arms out and down, slides his feet, points his pelvis, rocks, stamps; his gaze goes up and down and returns to meet the camera. He moves like a kid at a rave, maybe a kid in love. It’s a fitting coda to the “One Year Performances” and to the works of removal: the artist in “life time,” enjoying himself in a way he rarely could in “art time.” He looks free. But you won’t see this video at a museum. Hsieh is clear, before pressing play: “Entertainment — not art.”
The post This Artist Once Spent a Year in a Cage. Now He’s Trying to Enjoy Himself. appeared first on New York Times.
