TEHCHING HSIEH

“Life is a life sentence; 

life is passing time; 

life is freethinking.” Tehching Hsieh

​

​

Doing Time exhibits two of Hsieh’s One Year Performances together for the first time, assembling his accumulated documents and artefacts into detailed installations. In One Year Performance 1980-1981, Hsieh subjected himself to the dizzying discipline of clocking on to a worker’s time clock on the hour, every hour, for a whole year. In One Year Performance 1981-1982, Hsieh inhabited a further sustained deprivation: he remained outside for a year without taking any shelter.

 

Each work convenes different methods of documentation, challenging what it might mean to archive a life. Together these monumental performances of subjection mount an intense and affective discourse on human existence, its relation to systems of control, to time and to nature. Hsieh’s fugitive presence – traced throughout – speaks both of the abject conditions and ingenuity of survival for those who have nothing. During the course of his One Year Performances Hsieh was an illegal immigrant.

​

The final room of Doing Time takes us back to three of Hsieh’s previously unseen works: short performances and photographs, all made in Taipei in 1973, before his emigration. At the close of the exhibition a documentary, Outside Again, returns Hsieh at the age of sixty- five to the original sites of his performances in Taipei and New York, making a meditation on the resonances of these far-sighted works.