Tehching Hsieh: The Art of Survival
by Paul Laster

Time plays a significant role in the art of Tehching Hsieh. Famous for his one-year performances spent in isolation, Hsieh marks his point of departure not with the day that he left Taiwan, but rather with the day he first set foot in America after jumping ship in 1974. The 23-year-old Hsieh arrived in the US on an Iranian oil tanker that docked near Philadelphia. Risking a heavy fine and the loss of his Taiwan passport, Hsieh walked down the gangway to a new existence. He hailed a taxi to Philadelphia, but fearing immigration officials might catch him, spent his last money on a taxi to New York.

Hsieh had relatives in New York, but they worried about the consequences of harboring an illegal alien and begrudgingly sheltered him. After working four years as a busboy, and with funds from his family in Taiwan, Hsieh rented a loft in Tribeca and began life as an artist. He divided the space into rentable studios, keeping one for himself.

Although he had no formal education, Hsieh had been an aspiring abstract painter in Taiwan, but now turned to action and gesture. (He had broken with painting before leaving his homeland by jumping out of a second-story window as an art action.) Though he knew nothing of conceptual or performance art, he was already heading in that stylistic direction. His first New York work, One Year Performance 1978-1979, or The Cage Piece, began with Hsieh shaving his head and entering a self-imposed isolation in an 11 1/2 x 9 x 8 foot barred cell in his studio on September 30, 1978.

In a statement, he declared that he would not talk, read, write, listen to the radio or watch TV for a year. A friend brought him food, water and clothing, removed his waste, and posted flyers about the performance and its open viewings. Wearing a white uniform with the pseudonym Sam Hsieh and the dates of the action embroidered on it, he documented his transformation from hairless to shaggy inmate with a daily photograph. Additional photographs, shot from outside the cage, reveal the artist reclining on the bed or squatting on a bucket toilet. There was little else for Hsieh to do. After three months of contemplating his existence, Hsieh began to look for faces in shadows, watch insects with intense fascination and pace the length of the cage. Thinking became the art. He imagined his bed in the corner as the confines of the cage and the rest of the enclosed space as outdoors. A daily scratch on the wall marked the time he had survived and the days remaining.

The intensity of The Cage Piece steeled Hsieh for his next one-year performance, which came after a six-month hiatus. The Time Piece required Hsieh to punch a time clock every hour on the hour from April 11, 1980, to April 11, 1981. After punching the clock, he documented himself with a single frame of 16 mm film and immediately left the room. He shaved his head at the beginning and became a longhair at the end. He set an alarm watch in order to meet the challenge; occasionally he punched the clock prematurely, late, or missed it altogether because of sleep. He wore a gray uniform embroidered with the details of the performance and spent his free hours taking care of daily activities and posting flyers announcing the event and visiting days. At the end, a witness signed the punch cards and the film was certified as unedited footage.

Hsieh’s third and most challenging one-year performance began September 26, 1981. The Outdoor Piece demanded that he live outside and never enter a building, subway, train, car, airplane, ship, cave or tent. He permitted himself no exceptions, even to buy food or use the restroom. He had a backpack with clothes, a camera and other necessities and a sleeping bag. He mainly kept to himself. New York City became his extended home, Chinatown was his kitchen, the West Village his bedroom and other areas his bathroom. He documented the performance with photographic self-portraits and maps of his solitary journeys.

That winter of 1981 was severe. His homeless lifestyle culminated in his being arrested for trespassing and charged with possession of a weapon—the nunchucks he carried for self-protection. He was held overnight and released, even though he didn’t have any identification papers. Emboldened by the fact that his status as an illegal alien had not been detected, he stopped using the alias Sam in favor of his given name. The fear that had kept him in isolation, and motivated many of his actions, was starting to diminish.

After three one-year solo actions, Hsieh sought out a companion for the next. His work had gained attention and curators and other artists sought him out. Another New York-based performance artist who had made works about art and life agreed to one of the strangest adventures of their careers. On July 4, 1983, Hsieh and Linda Montano declared: “We will stay together for one year and never be alone. We will be in the same room at the same time, when we are inside. We will be tied together at the waist with an eight-foot rope. We will never touch each other during the year.”

Montano and Hsieh had to do everything together and disagreed on most. They shared their work and the profits. They lived in Hsieh’s loft, sleeping separately, but also walked her dog three times a day. They documented the piece with daily snapshots and audio recordings, though the latter have not been released. In a 1984 interview, however, Montano discussed her fear of being caught on the other side of an elevator door and the risk of riding bicycles together, while Hsieh described the piece as a symbol of life and human struggle.

The “rope piece” was different from Hsieh’s earlier, private works. Hsieh had been largely unknown because he did not work with galleries. Montano was a celebrated feminist. The photographs show them at dinners, meetings and art events. It’s arguable that the discomfort of this sudden social and professional exposure provoked Hsieh’s next one-year performance, an untitled year without art. On July 1, 1985, Hsieh issued a statement that during the ensuing 365 days he would not make art, talk about art, look at art, read about art or go to a museum or gallery; he would just go on with life. The following July, the only documentation of the work was his statement and a poster with no image or visiting dates. His activity was successful in that most of the art world stopped calling.

From now on there was no turning back. His subsequent piece, Earth, was another hermetic performance work that would tackle the remainder of the century, from his 36th birthday on December 31, 1986, until his 49th birthday on December 31, 1999. This 13-year work began with a statement declaring that he would make art but not show it publicly. On January 1, 2000, Hsieh issued a statement to an audience of artists, curators and press at New York’s Judson Memorial Church, renowned for its support of performance art. A collage, resembling a hostage note, was ceremoniously unveiled. It read: “I kept myself alive. I passed the December 31, 1999 [sic].”

Hsieh said that he had not made any art in the preceding years and had not documented the 13-year piece in any way. He said the concept was survival. He worked at life, doing carpentry and aided by financial support from his mother; and he was still here. When asked what he would do next, he said he did not know. Was Hsieh making art and keeping it secret, like Duchamp had done for years? Or was this survival really his art, as it had been from the start?

In 1988, Hsieh applied for a residency card through an amnesty program and in 1994 became an American citizen. In 2000, while lecturing in Beijing, he met a young Chinese artist, Qinqin Li, and they married. They now live in Brooklyn in a loft that Hsieh designed and built. He still believes that you cannot make art to make a living, yet his work is discussed in every major publication about performance art. He no longer makes art, but maintains a studio to perpetuate the work he created. There’s a lot of documentation from years of daily production, which continues to be shown internationally. For Hsieh, art is an accumulation of actions and, in the end, art is life.

A presentation of documentation and ephemera by Tehching Hsieh will be on display as part of VITAL 2007: International Chinese Live Art Festival, Manchester, from November 20-23. In 2008, MIT Press will publish a monograph of Tehching Hsieh’s work and the complete documentation from The Time Piece will be included in a group exhibition in 2009 at the Guggenheim Museum in New York.