Lecture 2: Tehching Hsieh

       Tehching Hsieh is a Taiwanese American artist who creates several stunning performance art works. These works are called One Year Performance. Hsieh’s works are known as disintegrate the boundary between art and life, which are not escapist entertainment. Although he never tries to integrate into the art system, his works has continued to provoke academic reflection and discussion as well as to become an important coordinate in the field of performance art. Hsieh’s influence and reach cannot be questioned. His performance art plays a crucial role in the development of contemporary Chinese art in the 1990s that has profound and enlightening meaning. 

       In 1983, Hsieh’s fourth one year performance Cage Life had been working with Linda Montano. They were connected by a rope, at the same time; they tried to avoid the actual contact in order to retain a feeling for their own spaces. Hsieh locked himself and Montano in a cage that built in the attic for a whole year. The cage seems like a prison. There were no one talk to them and they were not communicating with each other. They could not do anything such as listen and read except thinking and count the days. Every day, Hsieh marked on the wall and took a picture of him by himself to record the suffering. An assistant provided him with his daily food and emptied the garbage, but they never talk. 

       After the performance ended, they made an agreement to stop seeing each other again and have no any connection. The two people live together for a year who back to each other's life without any change. The result is cruel but real. The link between people sometimes is far-fetched and the relationship between people sometimes is fragile. The rope’s moral is so profound because I realize the value of freedom through it. The connections between people are bound to violate the privacy of each other. The infringement is not obvious in acceptable range. However, it is the cruelest deprivation when everything is naked. This one year performance art makes people think about how human relationships dose works. It explores the intimate boundaries, what makes two independent people become a couple, what means to them about keep close contact for a long time.