Dia Announces Major Gift From Legendary Performance Artist Tehching Hsieh
First Ever Retrospective of the Artist’s One Year Performances Will Bring Paramount Works Together at Dia Beacon in 2025
New York, New York, October 3, 2024 – Dia Art Foundation today announced an unprecedented gift from artist Tehching Hsieh of 11 career-defining works, spanning from his earliest performances in 1973 to his final work in 1999. Dia will subsequently mount the first-ever retrospective of the artist’s radical practice at Dia Beacon in Fall 2025.
“It is an immense honor for Dia to be the recipient of this exceptional gift, and we are delighted to begin this deep relationship with Tehching Hsieh. Hsieh is a true trailblazer, with a uniquely single-minded dedication to the execution of his durational performance works. We are honored that we will also be able to bring these works together, for the first time, at Dia Beacon next year and demonstrate fully the extraordinary rigor of his practice. The addition of Hsieh’s work to Dia’s focused permanent collection expands our long-term interests in durational practices and our commitment to ambitious work that goes beyond the scope of the traditional gallery space—as has been the cornerstone of Hsieh’s practice for many decades,” said Jessica Morgan, Dia’s Nathalie de Gunzburg Director.
Hsieh is known for his year-long durational performances that challenged the distinction between art and life by enacting daring and stringent living conditions as part of the work. Hsieh has gathered the materials and documents from these performances—largely realized in seclusion and recorded on camera (both still and video)—into an extraordinary body of room-size installations. Now entrusted to Dia, the institution will act as the permanent steward for Hsieh’s remarkable oeuvre.
The gift comprises an encompassing group of objects and documentation that make up the artist’s One Year Performances, the body of five works for which he is perhaps best known. Hsieh withdrew from communication while living in a cage during One Year Performance 1978–1979 (Cage Piece); punched a time clock every hour on the hour duringOne Year Performance 1980–1981 (Time Clock Piece); lived entirely without shelter during One Year Performance1981–1982 (Outdoor Piece); lived tied to another artist, Linda Montano, without touching during Art/Life One Year Performance 1983–1984 (Rope Piece); and refrained from looking at, talking about, and making art during One Year Performance 1985–1986 (No Art Piece).
Following the last One Year Performance, Hsieh began his final work, Tehching Hsieh 1986–1999 (Thirteen Year Plan), which has also been gifted to Dia. Inverting the actions of No Art Piece, Hsieh made artworks throughout the Thirteen Year Plan, but withheld everything he produced from the public. Hsieh’s practice can be put in dialogue with acts of extreme bodily manipulation by artists such as Marina Abramović and Chris Burden with Hsieh differentiating himself by imposing severe restrictions on his daily existence for years at a time. In addition to exploring physical limits, his radical durational performances addressed human isolation and labor, the binding of social relations, our need for shelter, and the passing of time itself.
To complement the gift of his formative performances, Hsieh has also given Dia five early works which provide context for his conceptual development in the 1970s. These include editions of Exposure (1973), Jump (1973), Paint-Red-Repetition (1973), and Road Repair (1973), as well as an edition of Wanted by U.S. Immigration Service (1978).
The forthcoming exhibition at Dia Beacon in 2025 will mark the first time all five One Year Performances are shown together, and the first-ever showing of Rope Piece and No Art Piece. Together with the presentation of Thirteen Year Plan, the works in this exhibition are a lasting testimony to what have come to be known as Hsieh’s “lifeworks.” They offer a revelatory insight into the artist’s excruciatingly demanding, diligent, and moving oeuvre. Tehching Hsieh is co-curated by Humberto Moro, Dia’s deputy director of program, and guest curator Adrian Heathfield.
“Tehching Hsieh is simultaneously revered and still undiscovered by many. His vision is unparalleled—he was able to perceive the concatenation of his works as a totality, where exiting art and ‘keeping himself alive’ are very much part of the work. Perhaps like no one else, Hsieh has contested the so-called boundaries between art and life with a willingness to self-impose rigorous—sometimes unfathomable—conceptual and physical parameters. The artist’s unwavering commitment brings to the fore issues of immigration, labor, equality, and language, which remain incredibly timely and core subjects of research for Dia’s current program,” said Humberto Moro, Dia’s deputy director of program.
Guest curator Adrian Heathfield remarks: “Hsieh was an undocumented outsider artist whose convention-busting work was once largely ignored, withheld, and then sent into a future that has just arrived. Seen together at last, over a quarter of a century after their conclusion, these works are a testament to Hsieh’s enduring vision of life at the edge of societal recognition, comfort, and visibility. Hsieh’s constraints changed his life again and again, and in doing so revealed life’s inherent resilience, its tendencies toward resistance and transformation. These works’ qualities of inactivity, silence, itinerancy, making-do, withdrawal, and exhaustion speak powerfully to the current human condition.”
About Tehching Hsieh
Tehching Hsieh was born in Nan Chou, Taiwan, in 1950. The Taiwanese-American artist is one of the world’s most respected performance makers, renowned for a series of works in the late 1970s and early ’80s that revolutionized the conceptual, physical, aesthetic, and temporal limits of performance art. Hsieh dropped out of high school in 1967 and took up painting. After finishing his compulsory army service (1970–73), his first solo show was held at the gallery of the American News Bureau in Taipei. Shortly after his debut presentation, he stopped painting entirely and began a series of works dealing with action and its serial traces in documents, culminating in Jump (1973), in which he recorded his fall from a second-story window, breaking both of his ankles. Starting in the late 1970s, Hsieh made a series of five One Year Performances, and in 1986 announced his Thirteen Year Plan—he would spend the next 13 years making art but not showing it publicly. Since then, released from the restriction of not showing his works, Hsieh has exhibited at major museums, festivals, and biennales, including at the Guggenheim, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Neue Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin; Tate Modern, London; and at the Venice Biennale, where he represented Taiwan in 2017. His works are in the collections of Dia Art Foundation, New York; M+, Hong Kong; and Tate Modern. Hsieh lives in Brooklyn.
About Dia Art Foundation
Taking its name from the Greek word meaning “through,” Dia was established in 1974 with the mission to serve as a conduit for artists to realize ambitious new projects, unmediated by overt interpretation and uncurbed by the limitations of more traditional museums and galleries. Dia’s programming fosters contemplative and sustained consideration of a single artist’s body of work and its collection is distinguished by the deep and longstanding relationships that the nonprofit has cultivated with artists whose work came to prominence particularly in the 1960s and ’70s.
In addition to Dia Beacon, Dia Bridgehampton, and Dia Chelsea, Dia maintains and operates a constellation of commissions, long-term installations, and site-specific projects, notably focused on Land art, nationally and internationally. These include:
- Walter De Maria’s The New York Earth Room (1977) and The Broken Kilometer (1979), Max Neuhaus’s Times Square (1977), and Joseph Beuys’s 7000 Eichen (7000 Oaks, inaugurated in 1982 and ongoing), all located in New York
- De Maria’s The Lightning Field (1977), in western New Mexico
- Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970), in the Great Salt Lake, Utah
- Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels (1973–76), in the Great Basin Desert, Utah
- De Maria’s The Vertical Earth Kilometer (1977), in Kassel, Germany
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For additional information or materials, contact:
(U.S. press inquiries)
Hannah Gompertz, Dia Art Foundation, hgompertz@diaart.org, +1 212 293 5598
Melissa Parsoff, Parsoff Communications, mparsoff@parsoff-communications.com, +1 516 445 5899
(International press inquiries)
Sam Talbot, sam@sam-talbot.com, +44 (0) 772 5184 630