Under the leadership of director Jessica Morgan, New York’s Dia Art Foundation has been steadily broadening its purview beyond the largely white, male creators of the canonical works of Minimalist and Land Art of the 1960s and ‘70s where it for years mainly directed its patronage. Since she took the reins in 2015, Dia has mounted major shows of artists such as Mel Edwards, Sam Gilliam, Lee Ufan, and Senga Nengudi.
Now, through a major gift of works by Taiwanese-American artist Tehching Hsieh and a retrospective built around them, it is deepening its commitment the field of performance art, long neglected by museums but gaining ground in recent years; the museum owns performance works by Joan Jonas, Rita McBride, and Robert Whitman.
Hsieh has donated 11 works spanning his entire career—from his first performance in 1973 to his final work in 1999. These were sometimes “performed” in private, the video and photo documentation mainly constituting the work, while others took place in public, though not in art venues.
Tehching Hsieh, One Year Performance 1978-1979. Photo: Cheng Wei Kuong. © Tehching Hsieh. Courtesy Dia Art Foundation.
In press materials, Morgan called the gift “an immense honor” and described the artist as “a true trailblazer.”
The artist is known for a group of yearlong works that can be described as punishing. In his New York loft, he built a cage in 1978 that he inhabited for a year (in the New York Times T Magazine, Andrew Russeth called it “one of the century’s most harrowing art pieces”). A year later, for 365 days, he punched a time clock every hour of every day. For another work the next year, he did not go indoors for 12 months. And a year later, he was tied to fellow artist Linda Montano for a year, but with the rule that they could not touch each other. Finally, for a year he refrained from looking at, talking about, or making art for the same timespan.
Tehching Hsieh, One Year Performance 1981-1982. Photo Tehching Hsieh. © Tehching Hsieh. Courtesy Dia Art Foundation.
There is a Duchampian echo to his final work. After his final one-year performance, he embarked upon the piece Tehching Hsieh 1986–1989 (Thirteen Year Plan), in which he created work but never showed it, like the Frenchman working on his notorious Étant Donné while supposedly retired. He has also given five early works that provide context for the later oeuvre.
Poster for Tehching Hsieh’s Tehching Hsieh 1986–1999 (Thirteen Year Plan), 1986–99. © Tehching Hsieh. Courtesy Dia Art Foundation.
Fall 2025 will see the artist’s first-ever retrospective, at Dia Beacon. Co-curated by deputy director of program Humberto Moro and guest curator Adrian Heathfield, it will be the first time the five one-year performances will appear together under one roof.
“The last 10 years has been transformational for Dia’s collection and program, with more than 400 works entering our permanent collection,” said Moro in an email. “In this time, Dia has made great strides in diversifying our programming to include a wider array of voices, particularly women and artists of color. This extraordinary gift from Tehching Hsieh significantly broadens Dia’s purview by deepening our commitment to durational performance practices.”
“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,” said Heathfield in press materials.
Tehching Hsieh, Linda Montano, Art/Life One Year Performance 1983-1984, New York. Photo: Tehching Hsieh and Linda Montano. © Tehching Hsieh, Linda Montano. Courtesy Dia Art Foundation.
His oeuvre has some echoes with other performance artists who are his contemporaries and who subjected themselves to stringent rules and extreme discomfort, such as Marina Abramoviç and Chris Burden. Burden, in his best-known piece, had himself shot by a friend, but he also crawled over broken glass and once shut himself in a locker for a piece while at art school.
Abramoviç once lived for an entire show on a platform at New York’s Sean Kelly Gallery, on public view, with the only way to get down from the platform being ladders whose handles were knives. In her best-known performance, she sat for eight to 10 hours a day in the atrium at New York’s Museum of Modern Art every day for three months, staring into the eyes of all comers during her retrospective, “The Artist is Present.”
Hsieh visited the MoMA exhibition, in fact, and was photographed opposite Abramoviç.
Marina Abramoviç, left, and, Tehching Hsieh at the opening night party for the show “Marina Abramoviç: The Artist is Present,” Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2010. Photo: Will Ragozzino/PatrickMcMullan.com.
“To me, he’s a master,” Abramovic told the New York Times in 2020. “I am just a little student of him.”
Reached by email, Hsieh was less interested in how his work is in contrast with parts of Dia’s collection than with some commonalities.
“I consider my work to do with the exploration of time and human existence,” he said. “In Dia’s collection, there are artists’ works relate to time as well, such as Hanne Darboven and On Kawara. The documents of my work enable conversations between people, and Dia is the best place to do so. It’s my honor.”
The museum wasn’t initially angling for a gift, Hsieh said, but merely inquiring about the possibility of a show. “I asked the director Jessica Morgan if Dia would be interested in collecting my work. She happily accepted it.”
Moro noted that his conversation with the artist goes back more than a decade. “This exhibition works as a total work of art insofar as the space is equally important as the works—it symbolizes what Hsieh describes as ‘art time’ and ‘life time,’ or in other words, the time he spent doing performances and the spaces in between.”
Hsieh pointed out that the gift came partly out of the passage of time itself.
“The reason is I’m getting old and unable to keep them myself,” he added.
“My lifeworks needs a large space for exhibition, so Jessica and Dia’s internal meeting decided to give me the largest space for the exhibition in the basement level,” he said. “I’m very happy.”