Photograph © Hugo Glendinning
Tehching Hsieh was born in 1950 in Nan-Chou, Taiwan. Hsieh dropped out from high school in 1967 and took up painting. After finished compulsory military service (1970 – 73), Hsieh had his first solo show at the gallery of the American News Bureau in Taiwan. Shortly after this he stopped painting entirely and began making a series of works dealing with action and its serial traces in documents, culminating in Jump, a work in which he recorded his fall from a second story window, breaking both of his ankles. Hsieh trained as a seaman, working on oil tankers, which he then used as a means to enter the United States in July 1974. He was an undocumented worker in the States for fourteen years until he was granted amnesty and citizenship in 1988.
Starting in the late 1970s, Hsieh made a series of five extraordinary One Year Performances. In the unfolding series of these projects Hsieh moved from a year of solitary confinement in a cage without any communication; to a year in which he punched a worker’s time clock in his studio on the hour every hour; to a year spent living without any shelter on the streets of Manhattan; to a year in which he was tied closely to the artist Linda Montano without touching, and lastly, to a year of total abstention from art activities and influences.
In 1986 Hsieh announced his ‘Thirteen Year Plan’: he would spend the next thirteen years making art but not showing it publicly. This final lifework—an immense act of self-affirmation and self-erasure—came to a close at the turn of the millennium. Using long durations, severe conceptual constraints and simple documentary mechanisms, Hsieh made life and art simultaneous and achieved one of the most radical approaches to the limits of contemporary art. The first four One Year Performances made Hsieh a regular name in the art scene in New York; the last two pieces, intentionally retreating from the art world, set a tone of sustained invisibility.
Since the millennium, released from the restriction of not showing his works, Hsieh has exhibited elements of his oeuvre at major museums, festivals and Biennales globally, including shows at the Guggenheim and Museum of Modern Art, New York, Tate Modern London, Neue Nationalgalerie Berlin, and most extensively in his acclaimed exhibition for Taiwan, Doing Time, at the Venice Biennale in 2017. His work has now also entered the collections of Tate Modern, M+ Hong Kong, and Dia Beacon during a period of considerable critical, art historical and museological recognition.
Tehching Hsieh lives in Brooklyn, New York.