Tehching Hsieh Turned Every Second Into Art

At Dia, the cage has been reconstructed in full, complete with Hsieh’s boots and his tally marks gouged into the wall. Every day, Hsieh was photographed by his friend, and the photos, which are wrapped around the gallery, show his facial expression fixed from week to week, month to month—relaxed and blank. The only element that really changes is his hair, which becomes its own kind of clock, every strand a device for measuring the earth’s rotation in inches. If you stand in front of the cage, stare at it for a long time, and really try to go there—to imagine the acreage of your life shrinking down to this slab of concrete, this cot, and the contents of your mind, and not for a day or a month but for a full Gregorian year—I think most of us hit a wall. It’s hard enough to imagine the torture of solitary confinement at the hands of the state. It’s impossible to imagine choosing that punishment voluntarily. Forest monks, anchorites, and hermits have made similar sacrifices in the name of God. Hsieh did so in the name of art.

Was Hsieh’s self-imprisonment a statement on mass incarceration or prison reform? No, or, at least, not according to him. Hsieh said that he just wanted to think freely, to experience the flow of time; he wasn’t interested in chasing spiritual transport or political meaning. His life tells a more complicated story, though. Hsieh was born in Taiwan in 1950, a year after the Kuomintang, until recently China’s ruling party, fled Mao Zedong and the mainland, and set up shop in Taipei. Hsieh, when asked about his youth, has glossed the atmosphere as “conservative” and “oppressive,” avoiding particulars. In fact, he grew up during the so-called White Terror, when Taiwan was under martial law and citizens could be arrested, imprisoned, and tortured for doing anything even vaguely seditious. (Thousands were also summarily executed.) It was not an ideal environment for someone like Hsieh, who dropped out of high school, listened to rock and roll, grew his hair long, and drank down existentialism by the gallon. His heroes were Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche, and Kafka: outsiders, pain artists, and intellectual misfits.

Hsieh started painting when he was eighteen, and cycled through a few splatter-type and minimalist gestures, but nothing stuck. By the age of twenty-three, he’d done three years of compulsory military service, abandoned painting, and attached himself to something called Conceptual Art. He didn’t know what it meant, but he liked the idea of it. He bought a Super 8 camera and attempted a series of actions. In “Jump Piece” (1973), he leapt from a second-floor window onto a slab of concrete and broke both of his ankles. In another work, he submerged himself in a container of horse shit; in yet another, he ate fried rice and fruit salad, and threw it up. In retrospect, he describes all of this as “bad art.”

A poster for Hsieh’s “Outdoor Piece,” during which he did not go indoors for a year.Art work by Tehching Hsieh / Courtesy Dia Art Foundation

The real work began with the one-year performances, after he took a job on an oil tanker, jumped ship near Philadelphia, and arrived in New York, in 1974. Following “Cage Piece,” Hsieh produced “Time Clock Piece” (1980-81), in which he punched a time clock in his studio every hour on the hour for a year. According to Marina Abramović, who calls Hsieh “the master,” this was his most difficult performance. The piece required the entire radius of Hsieh’s life to be constrained by the clock. He could never sleep for more than an hour, or go anywhere an hour round trip beyond its reach. Next were “Outdoor Piece” and “Rope Piece.” For the former, Hsieh pledged not to go indoors: to enter no building, subway, train, car, airplane, ship, cave, or tent from 1981 to 1982. He roamed the streets of New York City, mostly lower Manhattan, and recorded on maps where he walked, ate, defecated, and slept. The exhibition features his maps and sullied backpack, toothbrush, bar of soap, and survival goods, along with photos of him sleeping on park benches, crouching on the banks of the Hudson in front of ice floes, and haunting the city. In “Rope Piece” (1983-84), he and the artist Linda Montano tied themselves together with an eight-foot rope. They worked in a gallery, slept in adjacent beds, and used a bathroom with no door, inventing an entirely new kind of interpersonal torture. It often didn’t go well.