Tehching Hsieh

Tehching (Sam) Hsieh (謝德慶; born 31 December 1950; Nan-Chou, Pingtung County, Taiwan) is a performance artist. He has been called a "master" by fellow performance artist Marina Abramović.

He was one of 15 children from a family in southern Taiwan; his father, Ching Hsieh had five wives. He dropped out from high school and started creating paintings; he went on to create several performance pieces after finishing his three years of compulsory military service in Taiwan. In 1974, he jumped ship to a pier on the Delaware River, near Philadelphia, and made his way to New York City, working as a dishwasher and cleaner during his first four years there.

From 1978 to 1986, Hsieh accomplished five One Year Performances; from 1986–1999, he worked on what he called his "Thirteen-Year Plan". On 1 January 2000, in his report to the public, he announced that he had kept himself alive. He stopped making art since then.

In 2008, MIT Press published Out of Now, The Lifeworks of Tehching Hsieh by Adrian Heathfield and Hsieh - a monograph with documentation, essays by academics and artists and an extended conversation with him. The year after its release, he told the New York Times, "Because of this book I can die tomorrow."

In 2009, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) (MoMA) in New York exhibited a collection documenting his performance. The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York also showed one of his works in 2009 as part of its retrospective exhibition, "The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia: 1860-1989."

Curated by Adrian Heathfield, Taiwan's Pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale in 2017 featured Hsieh's work in an exhibition titled Doing Time.

...
Wikipedia