Tehching Hsieh

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Tehching Hsieh exhibition in the Museum of Modern Art (2009)

Tehching (Sam) Hsieh (謝德慶) (born December 31, 1950 in Nan-Chou in Taiwan ) is a performance artist who is best known for his long-term performances .

Life

In 1967 he left school to begin his artistic career with painting. 1970–1973 he did military service. Shortly afterwards he had his first exhibition, but did not pursue painting any further, instead devoting himself to performance art. He developed his first independent performance Jump Piece , based on Yves Klein 's photomontage Jump into the Void (original title: Leap into the void) in Taiwan. After he also trained as a seaman, he emigrated to Philadelphia in the USA in 1974. He has been an American citizen since 1988. In the period between arrival and naturalization, he worked as an employee on an oil tanker in the port of Philadelphia. As an illegal immigrant, the threat of deportation was existential for him every day, whereupon his first One Year Performance Cage Piece was created in 1978–1979, alluding to this fact . After holding various positions, he now lives in New York .

His One Year Performances were the stepping stone to his career as a performance artist, through which he ultimately became known. Although the works inevitably suggest sadhus , Carr quotes the artist, Hsieh often feels misunderstood and that his artistic work is not an ascetic training.

Works

  • One Year Performance 1978-1979 (Cage Piece)

In this performance, Hsieh locked himself in a wooden cage for a year. The facility of the cage was reduced to the bare minimum. He only kept essential pieces of furniture, such as a washbasin, a bed, and a bucket for urgency. Hsieh was not allowed to speak, read or listen to the radio. A friend provided him with the basics, disposed of his rubbish and documented Hsieh's condition in a photo. Visitors were allowed once or twice a month. The cage piece was based on Hsieh's time as an illegal immigrant shortly after his arrival in America in 1974. During the period between his arrival in the new country and his naturalization, he was threatened with deportation back to his home country Taiwan every day. Isolation and fear of going to prison are addressed in this project. The time to naturalization has been shortened from fourteen years to one year, but the mental and physical strain is achieved equally.

  • One Year Performance 1980–1981 (Time Clock Piece)

This action consisted of having to operate a time clock once an hour for a year and take a picture. The associated sleep deprivation had put him into a kind of delirium and led to some recordings being missed. In order to emphasize the changes in his body under the influence of time, he began his series of photos with his head shaved. During the performance, the hair then grew back naturally. At the end of the performance, a film was produced from the individual recordings and exhibited in the Museum of Modern Art in 2009. In retrospect, the work led him to the realization that "wasting time is my concept of life [...] Living is nothing but consuming time until you die."

  • One Year Performance 1981–1982 (Outdoor Piece)

Hsieh spent a year outdoors, he was not allowed to enter buildings or be in a covered place (car, train, etc.).

  • Art / Life: One Year Performance 1983–1984 (Rope Piece)

In this performance he was connected to the artist Linda Montano by a rope for a year, but the two were not allowed to touch. Montano said about the campaign: "It was a chance for the mind to practice paying attention, a way to stay in the moment." During this time he also met Marina Abramović , who says about him “He has made the most radical performances in the world, and nobody has done it longer or better than he has”

  • One Year Performance 1985–1986 (No Art Piece)

Transience motive

Evanescence or vanitas (Latin for "empty appearance, nothingness, vanity"; also "lies, boasting, failure and futility") describes the decay of an object over time. Hsieh takes up this change in the material as the basic idea of ​​his working principle and builds on it in his One Year Performances. The physical strain intensifies the aspect of passing away and transforms the human being as a medium to a mirror of transience.

In Hsieh's One Year Performance from 1980–1981, the decay of human youth is clearly visible: on Hsieh's initially shaved head, lush hair grows in length, the beginnings of a beard can be seen and dark circles and furrows form on the artist's face as Answer to the effort within this project.

The artist himself follows the conviction that man would do nothing more until his death than to consume time. It is the cycle of life that material and organic objects perish and form the basis for something new. The time on earth is limited for every living being and the dream of eternity is connected with transcendence. In Hsieh's works, the human striving for immortality and perfection is treated as secondary. They are based on the representation of the course over time, accompanied by the physical and psychological stress. With his works, however, Hsieh makes it clear that the goal of eternity is impossible to achieve and that man falls back into transience.

Exhibitions

photos

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ biography on the official website
  2. ^ A b C. Carr: On Edge: Performance at the End of the Twentieth Century . Wesleyan University Press, 2008. ISBN 978-0-8195-6888-5 . P. 5
  3. ↑ Mai Ardia: NYC-Based Artist Tehching Hsieh: When Life Becomes A Performance. (No longer available online.) In: The culture trip. Culture trip, January 12, 2017, archived from the original on August 11, 2019 ; accessed on February 20, 2017 (English). Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / theculturetrip.com
  4. ↑ Kathy Marks: Tehching Hsieh: the man who didn't go to bed for a year. In: theguardian. theguardian, April 30, 2014, accessed March 1, 2017 .
  5. ^ NY Times article
  6. ↑ Aimee Walleston: Tehching Hsieh by Marina Abramovic on vmagazine.com
  7. ↑ When life goes to work in FAZ from June 14, 2017 page 14

swell

  • Thomas McEvilley: The triumph of anti-art - conceptual and performance art in the formation of post-modernism . Documentext McPherson, New York 2005 pp. 319-334
  • Frazer Ward: Alien duration: Tehching Hsieh, 1978–1999 . In: The Art journal ( ISSN  0004-3249 ) Vol. 65, No. 3, Fall, 2006, pp. 6–19 (with license: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20068478 )
  • Paul Laster: The Art of Survival - Tehching Hsieh . Art AsiaPacific: today's art from tomorrow's world ( ISSN  1039-3625 ). - New York, NY 2007, 56, pp. 116-121
  • An Evening with Tehching Hsieh MoMA Multimedia. Video 1 , 2 , 3 on the occasion of the exhibition at MoMA 2009.
  • Barry Schwabsky: Live Work: this year has seen a resurgence of interest in the remarkable, often extreme, performances of Tehching Hsieh ... In: Frieze: contemporary art and culture. London 2009, 126, pp. 180-185
  • Adrian Heathfield: Out of now: the lifeworks of Tehching Hsieh . London 2009. ISBN 978-0-262-01255-3
  • Nike Bätzner: The studio as a cell - concepts by Piero Manzoni, Tehching Hsieh and Bruce Nauman . In: Topos Atelier: Workshop and Form of Knowledge. Akademie-Verlag, Berlin 2010. pp. 59–74

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Hsieh, Tehching
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Hsieh, Sam; 謝德慶 (Chinese)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Taiwanese performance artist
DATE OF BIRTH December 31, 1950
PLACE OF BIRTH Nan-Chou , Taiwan