VIEW THIS PAGE In 1974 Tehching Hsieh (謝德慶), a young Taiwanese performance artist working as a seaman, walked down the gangplank of an oil tanker docked in the Delaware River and slipped into the US. His destination: Manhattan, center of the art world.
Once there, though, Hsieh found himself ensnared in the benumbing life of an illegal immigrant. With the downtown art scene vibrating around him, he eked out a living at Chinese restaurants and construction jobs, feeling alien, alienated and creatively barren until it came to him: He could turn his isolation into art. Inside an unfinished loft, he could build himself a beautiful cage, shave his head, stencil his name onto a uniform and lock himself away for a year.
Thirty years later Hsieh’s Cage Piece is on display at the Museum of Modern Art as the inaugural installation in a series on performance art. But formal recognition of Hsieh, who is now a 58-year-old US citizen with spiky salt-and-pepper hair, has been a long time coming.
For decades he was almost an urban legend, his harrowing performances — the year he punched a time clock hourly, the year he lived on the streets, the year he spent tethered by a rope to a female artist — kept alive by talk.
The talk was cultish, flecked with reverence for the conceptual purity and physical extremity of Hsieh’s performances in the late 1970s and early 1980s. But he himself seemed to have vanished. “Tehching was a bit like a myth,” said Klaus Biesenbach, chief curator of MoMA’s department of media.
All along, however, Hsieh was invisible in plain sight, meticulously archiving his artistic portfolio as he went about the business of “dealing with life,” as he put it.
For 14 years, until he received amnesty in 1988, his immigration status, or lack of status, had informed his art, but it also made him an outsider, enduringly. His work was rarely collected, displayed or studied, and he eventually quit making art entirely.
“My work is kind of unknown, and I am not an artist anymore,” he said in his thickly accented English, which is fluent but limited, often making him sound terse.
Sipping green tea in his minimally furnished loft above a 99-Cent Plus shop in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, Hsieh pushed across his kitchen table a history of performance art that mentions him only in a sentence. “I don’t want to say it was race,” he said, noting that he has long been reticent to promote his work.
But Alexandra Munroe, senior curator of Asian art at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, had no such compunctions, given what she described as a historical disregard for nonwhite artists in the avant-garde. “Why was Tehching left out?” she said. “Because he was Chinese.”
This winter, owing to renewed interest in performance art, new passion for contemporary Chinese art and the coinciding interests of several curators, Hsieh’s moment of recognition has arrived from many directions at once.
The one-man show at MoMA runs through May 18. The Guggenheim is featuring his time-clock piece in The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia, 1860-1989 through April 19. MIT Press is about to release Out of Now, a large-format book devoted to his “lifeworks.” And United States Artists, an advocacy organization, has awarded Hsieh US$50,000, his first grant.
The roots of Hsieh’s lifelong questioning lie in southern Taiwan, where his little-known artistic odyssey began. There he grew up one of 15 children of an authoritarian father with five wives. But he was doted on by his mother.
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