Imagine committing an entire year of your life, not to a job, a relationship goal, or personal development in the usual sense, but to a single, rigorously defined artistic action. Then imagine doing this five times, back-to-back, with only brief recovery periods. This is the territory explored by Tehching Hsieh, a performance artist whose name became synonymous with extreme duration, endurance, and profound explorations of time, confinement, and existence itself. His One Year Performances, undertaken between 1978 and 1986 in New York City, remain some of the most demanding and thought-provoking works in contemporary art history.
Hsieh, originally from Taiwan, arrived in New York as an undocumented immigrant after jumping ship from an oil tanker. His early years involved struggle and working menial jobs, experiences that perhaps informed the raw, unadorned quality of his later artistic endeavors. He didn’t just conceptualize; he lived his art, using his own body and life-time as the medium and the canvas. His approach was radically simple in premise, yet monumentally difficult in execution.
The Five Pillars of Time
Hsieh’s reputation rests primarily on a series of five distinct One Year Performances. Each piece adhered to a strict set of self-imposed rules, documented meticulously, and pushed the boundaries of human physical and psychological limits. They weren’t about spectacle in the traditional sense, but about the profound commitment to process and the passage of time itself.
One Year Performance 1978–1979 (Cage Piece)
The journey began in September 1978. Hsieh built an 11.5 x 9 x 8-foot wooden cage within his Tribeca studio loft. He then locked himself inside for 365 days. The rules were severe: no talking, no reading, no writing, no listening to radio, no watching television. A lawyer notarized the process, ensuring adherence. His basic needs were met by a friend, Cheng Wei Kuong, who brought food, removed waste, and took a single photograph each day to document Hsieh’s presence and the slow changes over the year. Hsieh had his head shaved before entering, marking a visual starting point. The sheer sensory deprivation and isolation tested the limits of sanity. It was a raw confrontation with solitary existence, time measured only by meals and the daily click of the camera shutter.
One Year Performance 1980–1981 (Time Clock Piece)
If the Cage Piece explored confinement in space, the next performance tackled the relentless, structuring nature of time itself. From April 11, 1980, to April 11, 1981, Hsieh committed to punching a standard worker’s time clock every hour on the hour, twenty-four hours a day. This meant he could never sleep for more than fifty-nine minutes at a stretch. Again, he shaved his head at the start. Each punch was documented, creating a time card record for the year. He also took a single film frame of himself each time he punched the clock. When compiled, the resulting time-lapse film shows his hair growing, his posture changing, the visible toll of sleep deprivation, yet the persistent act repeats. This piece transformed the abstract concept of time into a tangible, physical burden, highlighting the way industrial time structures modern life, often at odds with natural human rhythms.
Tehching Hsieh’s commitment to his self-imposed rules was absolute for each performance. He prepared legally binding statements outlining the duration and constraints before each piece began. Meticulous documentation, including photographs, logbooks, time cards, maps, and witness statements, formed a crucial part of the artwork. This evidence verifies the completion of these incredibly demanding year-long actions.
One Year Performance 1981–1982 (Outdoor Piece)
Following the constraints of indoor space and regulated time, Hsieh moved his focus to the external environment. For one year, starting September 26, 1981, he vowed to live entirely outdoors in New York City. The crucial rule was that he could not enter any building or shelter – this included cars, trains, airplanes, boats, tents, or any other enclosed structure. He carried only a sleeping bag and basic necessities. He wandered the city, enduring harsh weather, finding places to sleep in parks or on sidewalks, relying on public facilities. This piece explored themes of survival, exposure, homelessness (though Hsieh differentiated his chosen artistic act from involuntary homelessness), and the relationship between the human body and the urban environment. He was arrested during this period, briefly disrupting the performance but highlighting the societal boundaries he was testing. Documentation involved maps tracking his movements and photographs.
Art/Life: One Year Performance 1983–1984 (Rope Piece)
This performance introduced a new element: collaboration and relationship. From July 4, 1983, Hsieh was tied to fellow performance artist Linda Montano by an eight-foot length of rope. They remained tied, 24 hours a day, for the entire year. The critical constraint here was that they were not allowed to touch each other during this time. They had to negotiate every movement, every private act, every moment of sleep and waking, tethered together yet maintaining physical distance. The piece explored intimacy, interdependence, conflict, communication (or lack thereof), and the tension between connection and separation. It was a performance about the dynamics of a relationship under extreme, artificial duress, turning the personal into a public, durational artwork.
One Year Performance 1985–1986 (No Art Piece)
Perhaps the most conceptually challenging, the final One Year Performance involved a negation. From July 1, 1985, to July 1, 1986, Hsieh declared he would simply live. He would not make art, not talk about art, not look at art, not go to galleries or museums. He would just spend one year *not* being an artist, at least in any public or defined sense. This piece turned the focus inward, questioning the very definition of art and the identity of the artist. Is art solely defined by production and exhibition? Can the deliberate withdrawal from art-making itself be an artistic statement? It was a quiet, almost invisible performance compared to the physical extremes of the others, but conceptually potent.
Legacy of Endurance
After completing the fifth One Year Performance, Tehching Hsieh embarked on an even longer project: a thirteen-year plan (1986-1999) during which he would make art but not show it publicly. On January 1, 2000, he released a simple statement: “I kept myself alive. I passed the December 31st, 1999.” This marked the end of his public art-making career.
What endures is the sheer audacity and commitment of the One Year Performances. They defy easy categorization. Are they tests of endurance? Philosophical inquiries? Sociological experiments? They are perhaps all of these. Hsieh used his life-time as his primary material, forcing audiences (and himself) to confront fundamental questions about freedom, confinement, time, work, human connection, and the very nature of art in the contemporary world. His work wasn’t about creating objects, but about living through extreme conditions under self-imposed rules, leaving behind the documentation as the residue of an extraordinary passage of time.
The influence of Hsieh’s work can be seen in subsequent generations of performance artists interested in duration, endurance, and the testing of limits. Yet, the raw simplicity and unwavering dedication of his One Year Performances remain uniquely powerful. They stand as stark reminders of the potential for art to intersect directly with life, demanding not just observation, but a contemplation of the time we all inhabit.
