In Dia, the cage was completely reconstructed, including Xie's boots and his marks embedded in the wall. Xie was photographed every day by a friend, and the photographs scattered throughout the gallery show the expression on his face, the same from week to week, month to month—relaxed and blank. The only element that really changes is his hair, which becomes a clock of sorts, each strand a device for measuring the Earth's rotation in inches. If you stand in front of a cage, look at it for a long time and really try go there– to imagine that the area of your life has been compressed into this concrete slab, this bed and the contents of your mind, and not for a day or a month, but for an entire year according to the Gregorian calendar – I think most of us have hit a wall. It is quite difficult to imagine the torture of solitary confinement by the state. It is impossible to imagine that you would choose such a punishment voluntarily. Forest monks, hermits and hermits made similar sacrifices in the name of God. Xie did it in the name of art.
Was Xie's self-imprisonment a statement about mass incarceration or prison reform? No, or at least according to him. Xie said that he just wanted to think freely, to feel the passage of time; he was not interested in the pursuit of spiritual transport or political meaning. However, his life tells a more complex story. Hsieh was born in Taiwan in 1950, a year after the Kuomintang, until recently China's ruling party, fled Mao Zedong and the mainland to settle in Taipei. Xie, when asked about his early life, described the atmosphere as “conservative” and “repressive,” avoiding specifics. In fact, he grew up during the so-called White Terror, when Taiwan was under martial law and citizens could be arrested, imprisoned and tortured for anything even remotely sedition. (Thousands of people were also summarily executed.) It was not an ideal environment for a man like Xie, who dropped out of school, listened to rock 'n' roll, grew his hair long, and drank existentialism by the gallon. His heroes were Dostoevsky, Nietzsche and Kafka: outsiders, artists of pain and intellectual failures.
Xie started drawing when he was eighteen and used some splatters and minimalist gestures, but nothing stuck. By the age of twenty-three, he had completed three years of compulsory military service, abandoned painting and devoted himself to what is called conceptual art. He didn't know what that meant, but he liked the idea. He bought a Super 8 camera and took a number of steps. In “Jump Piece” (1973), he jumped from a second-story window onto a concrete slab and broke both ankles. In another work, he plunged into a container of horse shit; in the third, he ate fried rice and fruit salad and vomited. Looking back, he describes the whole thing as “bad art.”
Xie's “Outdoors” poster, during which he didn't go indoors for a whole year.Artwork by Tehchin Xie / Courtesy of Dia Art Foundation
The real work began with a year of performing after he took a job on an oil tanker, jumped ship near Philadelphia and arrived in New York in 1974. After Cage Piece, Hsieh released Time Clock Piece (1980-81), in which he struck the clock in his studio every hour for a year. According to Marina Abramovic, who calls Xie a “master”, this was his most difficult performance. This piece required that Xie's entire life radius be limited to a clock. He could never sleep more than an hour or go anywhere an hour round trip out of range. Next up were “Outdoor Piece” and “Rope Piece”. Regarding the first, Xie promised not to go indoors: not to go into buildings, subways, trains, cars, planes, ships, caves, or tents from 1981 to 1982. He wandered the streets of New York, mostly lower Manhattan, and recorded on maps where he walked, ate, defecated, and slept. The exhibition features his maps and a soiled backpack, a toothbrush, a bar of soap and basic necessities, as well as photographs of him sleeping on park benches, crouching on the banks of the Hudson in front of ice floes and wandering around the city. In A Piece of Rope (1983–84), he and artist Linda Montano tied themselves together with eight feet of rope. They worked in the gallery, slept in adjacent beds, and shared a bathroom with no door, inventing a whole new kind of interpersonal torture. Often this did not go very well.
