Exhibition Review: The One Year Performance by Tehching Hsieh

            Tehching Hsieh was from Taiwan and has moved to the U.S since 1974. From 1978 through 1986, he had completed five One Year Performance pieces. The primary piece in this exhibition was one of his One Year Performance pieces, the Time Clock Piece, done by 1980 to 1981.

            Hsieh believes that "life is a sentence". His works explore the meaning of time and freedom. However, when performed in suffering way, he tended to show the irony of freedom throughout a person's life. In the Time Clock Piece, he had to punch a time clock every hour for an entire year, indicating the struggling with time. This piece was presented by all the time cards and the photographs that Hsieh took when he punched the time clock every time. In addition, the photos were collected to make a 6-minutes long video. The cards, photos, and video were all displayed in this exhibition.

Besides holding an exhibition, Hsieh also gave an artist lecture to introduce his other four performance pieces. To me, the Outdoor Piece (1981-1982) is the most interesting work. In this piece, Hsieh restricted himself to stay outside for one year and he could not enter any indoor space. Living like a homeless person, the Outdoor Piece is easily recognized as a respond to social issue by the audiences, even though Hsieh has declared that the work only focused on how we spending the time.

Tehching Hsieh is truly an amazing performance artist. He questions the meaning of existence in time. In most of the One Year performances, Hsieh shaved his head before starting, emphasizing the passage of time. The audiences tend to view his works in an aspect of social concern because we are extremely sensitive to things happened around our lives, such as environmental problems or social issues. But the One Year performance pieces also allow audiences to have a different look on individual existence and the meaning of consuming time throughout our lives.