The Artist Who Lived in a Cage For a Year

At Dia Beacon, a retrospective looks at the career of Tehching Hsieh, whose yearlong performance art pieces were some of the most grueling the medium has ever seen.

By Julia HalperinVisuals by Marcus Maddox

Reporting from Beacon, N.Y.

Sept. 30, 2025

“This is home,” the artist Tehching Hsieh proclaimed proudly. He was sitting on the edge of a discolored mattress inside a 9-by-11.5-foot cage. He occupied this tiny space from Sept. 30, 1978, to Sept. 30, 1979, as part of a performance artwork that has become the stuff of legend. He did not talk, read, write, listen to the radio or leave the enclosure for one year.

Almost five decades later, Hsieh cheerfully offered a reporter a tour of the cage, which he was reassembling in the basement of Dia Beacon, a factory turned museum in the Hudson Valley of New York. It is a centerpiece of his first retrospective, which opens Oct. 4 and runs for two years.

Hsieh, now 74, stopped making art in 2000. He spent the next decade thinking about how to present his radical, exacting and still poorly understood work to the world. It took him 15 more years to find a home for the retrospective.

Inside the cage, illuminated by a single lightbulb, there is a sink, a mirror and the same bar of soap and tube of toothpaste he used during his year of isolation. (He insists he never ran out.) A friend, the artist Cheng Wei Kuong, delivered his meals and removed his waste through a small opening between the bars every day.

Two months in, sick of eating nothing but Chinese broccoli with beef and rice, he threw the food on the ground to communicate his displeasure.

On the back wall of the cage are tally marks Hsieh carved with a nail clipper to record each passing day. The lines start off scratchy and raw and become progressively sharper — proof, he insists, that his thinking became clearer over time.

Hsieh has said that this work, “One Year Performance 1978-1979 (Cage Piece),” shows how individuals can experience psychological freedom even in the face of intense physical constraints. Every day, Hsieh, then 28, took himself for a walk “outside” — the empty space around the bed — before returning “home” to the mattress. In Dia’s basement, he smiled as he circled the cage’s interior, like a child showing off a blanket fort. “This is a street corner,” he said at the far edge of the cage.

Over an intense career, the Taiwanese American artist adopted simple yet extreme living conditions in a series of grueling yearlong performances that some might struggle to categorize as art. They did not require an audience and he was not playing a role. Instead, his artistic tools were the rules he set for himself, and his medium was his own life. “He is truly the master,” the performance artist Marina Abramovic said in an interview. She said she didn’t think people understood the stamina it takes to create such work.

Hsieh prefers to describe his performances as “lifeworks” rather than “artworks.” In “One Year Performance 1980-1981 (Time Clock Piece),” Hsieh punched a timecard clock every hour on the hour, including at night. He followed that up with “One Year Performance 1981-1982 (Outdoor Piece),” when he lived a nomadic life entirely outdoors in New York City, and “Art/Life One Year Performance 1983-1984 (Rope Piece),” when he spent the year tied to Linda Montano, an artist he hardly knew, with an eight-foot rope.

They pledged never to touch and slept in twin beds. (The bathroom in their apartment had no door, but every time one person wanted to go, both people had to get up.) Finally, there was “One Year Performance 1985-1986 (No Art Piece),” when he refused to look at, think about, talk about or make art.

Dia will present objects from and documentation of all five performances together for the first time. The art historian Adrian Heathfield, a curator of the exhibition, describes them as “test cases of elemental conditions.” In each work, Hsieh pushes his body and mind to the limit, according to Heathfield, asking us to consider what is truly essential, and what is necessary for a good life.

A Self-Imposed Exile

A compact man who looks at least a decade younger than his 74 years, Hsieh is a legend for a generation of performance artists and devotees. But he is far less famous than some of his biggest fans.

His contributions were minimized, according to Heathfield, because he was an undocumented Asian immigrant in an art world dominated by well-connected white men. He could not apply for grants because of his immigration status, and his work, like most performance-based art, was nearly impossible to sell. It did not help that Hsieh spoke almost no English when he arrived in New York in 1974, having taken a cleaning job on an oil tanker to escape what he described as Taiwan’s conservative culture.

The artist’s obscurity is also of his own making. He rarely attended openings and did not court tastemakers. “He only cared about his own work and had limited knowledge of other art,” said the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, who rented a small room in Hsieh’s SoHo loft in the early 1980s. “He was even unfamiliar with Duchamp,” Ai added.

As Hsieh’s profile rose, he withdrew even further. In 1986, Hsieh resolved to keep any art he made out of public view for 13 years. During that time, he tried to disappear, setting out for Alaska without telling a soul. The often overlooked coda of his “One Year Performances,” “Tehching Hsieh 1986-1999 (Thirteen Year Plan),” is presented publicly at Dia for the first time in the form of an empty gallery roughly the size of a tennis court.

True erasure — which Hsieh described as a kind of “double exile” after his departure from Taiwan — was harder than it seemed, both technically and emotionally. He never made it to Alaska. After six months working construction in Seattle to save money for the trip, he returned to New York. He concluded the 13-year performance at Judson Memorial Church in Greenwich Village on New Year’s Eve 1999, taking the stage to announce simply that he had kept himself alive.

Making Absence Present

Hsieh has made no art at all in the 21st century. Instead, he spent a decade developing the concept for his retrospective and meticulously assembling his archive. From 2015 to 2021, he ran a cafe called the Market in Brooklyn with his ex-wife, Qinqin Li.

The Museum of Modern Art in New York, which showed “Cage Piece” in 2009, and Tate Modern in London, which showed “Time Clock Piece” in 2017, turned him down before the project found a home at Dia, where Hsieh permanently donated the objects and documentation.

The challenge for Hsieh, and for Dia’s curators, is how to communicate the artist’s “lifeworks” — literal actions that endure as concepts — to audiences. And it may seem counterintuitive that Hsieh, who has spent a good chunk of his life trying to disappear, is now making himself visible again.

Over the years, Hsieh devised a model for the exhibition: five galleries in a straight line, one for each “One-Year Performance,” with hallways in between that would be proportional to the amount of time the artist spent living his regular life.

At the end of the show, Hsieh envisioned a gallery 13 times the length of the others, empty except for a sign at the entrance explaining his concept for “Thirteen Year Plan.”

Luckily, Dia Beacon — a 182,000-square-foot temple to minimalism — is “not afraid of empty space,” said the curator Humberto Moro, who is co-organizing the exhibition. But even Dia didn’t have the square footage for Hsieh’s dream layout. So the curators developed a condensed version.

Visitors will encounter photographs Hsieh took of himself in the cage every day, his shaved hair growing to his shoulders over the year. There are the 366 timecards he punched for “Time Clock Piece” and annotated maps of his journey around New York for “Outdoor Piece.” (“Chinatown was my kitchen; the Hudson River was my bathroom,” he has said.)

One of the final works in the show, “Rope Piece,” has never been shown in a museum before. It is the only work Hsieh made in collaboration with another artist. The gallery dedicated to the performance contains the rope that connected Hsieh and Montano as well as 367 photographs as they sit on the beach, work at their desks and wait for the other to finish whatever they happen to be doing.

Montano, now 83 and living in upstate New York, said they fought frequently; for long stretches, they communicated only by grunting or yanking the rope. Having grown up in a strict family where anger was discouraged, Montano said, “it was free therapy, in a way.” Today, Montano organizes workshops in meditation and movement and performs at museums and festivals. She and Hsieh will reunite for an artists’ talk at Dia Beacon on Oct. 4.

While Hsieh’s philosophy can seem opaque and his actions extreme, Heathfield contends that the pandemic and its aftermath made it more relatable. “Large parts of society had to undergo a series of conceptual constraints that ordered life, created a set of rules around contact and distance,” he said.

The Final Chapter

Hsieh said that his life as an artist was facilitated in part by his family in Taiwan, who gave him $55,000 that he used to buy property in Brooklyn after he completed “Rope Piece” in 1984. (He became a U.S. citizen in 1988.)

In 1998, he bought the building he lives in now for $190,000, and expects to sell it soon and live off the proceeds. (Hsieh also supported himself primarily through construction work.)

Hsieh describes his youth — including three years of compulsory military service in Taiwan — as preparation for his “One Year Performances.” Now, he considers this seemingly counterintuitive new chapter, in which he is writing himself back into history, as preparation for death.

“Even though I’m 74, it’s already time to prepare to die,” he said recently in the one air-conditioned room of his labyrinthine apartment. The space is tidy and utilitarian; carefully labeled bankers boxes line shelves he built by hand. The only soft surface evident during a brief tour was a small couch.

Moro, the Dia curator, likened Hsieh’s final two works about withdrawal and absence to the composer John Cage’s “4’33,” in which musicians sit in stillness for the amount of time specified in the title, leaving the audience to listen to whatever sound the world has to offer.

“My work is like an empty can,” Hsieh said, “and the audience can fit inside their own life experience.”

To summarize his worldview, Hsieh took a framed Peanuts comic strip off his desk. The first three panels show Snoopy lying down. In the final panel, Snoopy faces the opposite direction, his head where his feet were. Above him floats a thought bubble: “Life is changed.”

As Hsieh sees it, every day, regardless of how extreme or mundane our lives are, we share the same 24 hours; every year, the same 365 days. His work simply makes us aware of the size and shape of that shared container.

Asked what he wants out of this final stretch of “life time,” his response was at once simple and opaque. “To spend the time left,” he replied.

Video camera operator: Jensen Gore

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5787337&forum_id=2],#49356592)

Catherine

Taipei, Taiwan

Sept. 30

Times Pick

A fascinating, insightful piece - although I wish it had made explicit mention that Teching Hsieh grew up under what was then the longest period of martial law in modern history. Taiwan was under the one-party dictatorship of the Kuomintang from the end of WWII to the late 1980s. Like my father, like all young men in Taiwan at the time, he was conscripted for 2-3 years in service of the KMT's delusional goal of 'retaking the mainland'. Today, Taiwan is a thriving multiparty democracy and the army is tasked with defending Taiwan from, not invading, China. Before that, tens of thousands of people in Taiwan were killed, summarily executed, imprisoned, exiled, tortured, and silenced for their reading habits, speech, politics, and ethnic backgrounds.

To me, Hsieh's work seems far less superficial or self-indulgent when placed in the context of his youth in Taiwan. Whether or not this was his exact intention, he is telling us something about what it can mean to grow up under authoritarianism and the threat of being arbitrarily imprisoned - something we are also learning all too quickly in present-day America.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5787337&forum_id=2],#49356594)

The Houstonian

Houston

Sept. 30

Why a fascinating artist! I was prepared to read this article and make a snarky comment about it, having represented the involuntarily imprisoned for most of my working life, but Tehching Hsieh’s artistic life and practice captivates me. Thank you for this article and thank you to Mr. Hsieh for his willingness to discuss his work.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5787337&forum_id=2],#49356595)

Bill

New York

Sept. 30

Times Pick

I remember the “rope” piece. I saw a picture at the time of the two of them riding bikes together through the streets of Manhattan, with the rope tied between them. Reminds me of a New York now long gone. Back in the 90’s I was in SVA’s computer graphics masters program and had created a piece dedicated to Cage, which was to be preformed in a few days. My Mother in Law suggested I invite Cage. Not knowing where he lived, she said “I’ll bet he is in the Musicians Union book.” He was. (I married into the Local 802). As I went to drop an invite at his apartment, I see Cage walking down the street. I told him about the piece and he cut me short “Where?” I told him. “I’ll be there.” And he showed up and met my teachers. A month later he was gone. I’m blessed to have lived in a New York where people like Hsieh used to be whereever you looked, it seemed, New York was magical, and 2 dogs and a Papaya fed a starving artist for $2 bucks.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5787337&forum_id=2],#49356597)

Michelle

Seattle

Sept. 30

This was a lovely article. Bravo, Mr. Hsieh. Wherever you go, there you are. That is all. Thank you for the simplicity.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5787337&forum_id=2],#49356599)

New York

Sept. 30

@Matt D Very funny, as I'm sitting here thinking about solitude, what it means to meditate, and thinking about those who are incarcerated, as a result of this piece.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5787337&forum_id=2],#49356600)

New York

Sept. 30

Bravo to Hsieh for his bravery and commitment! The goal of Hsieh's work is to make us spectators think about our own lives: what we do with our time, space, bodies, minds....relationships, possessions and societies.

To the haters who write disparaging comments about Hsieh's work, I say this:

Ponder the impact of YOUR LIFE while you scroll mindlessly on social media, ignore your loved ones, eat junk-food and obey narcissists to the peril of Mother Earth.

I am thinking of incarcerated people, homeless people, the poor, the hungry and the lonely as I consider his life works. Hsieh lives with PURPOSE. I hope he lives well into his late-90's!

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5787337&forum_id=2],#49356602)

jo

boston

Sept. 30

This should have 100x the comments and everyone should know his name. The dedication man, only the highest respects

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5787337&forum_id=2],#49356603)