Tehching Hsieh, One Year Performance 1978–1979 (Cage Piece), 1978–79. 

Tehching Hsieh: Lifeworks 1978–1999, installation view, Dia Beacon, New York, 2025–27. 

© Tehching Hsieh. Photo: Bill Jacobson Studio, New York

Dia Beacon presentsTehching Hsieh: Lifeworks 1978–1999 in New York, the first-ever retrospective of Tehching Hsieh’s radical performances, following the artist’s gift of 11 career-defining works to Dia Art Foundation in 2024. The exhibition remains on view for two years, and it brings together the full scope of Hsieh’s durational works.

Hsieh’s legacy is defined by his collapse of art and life into durational structures of discipline and restraint. Though primarily a painter in his early career, from 1978 onward Hsieh devised yearlong performance works that subjected his body and existence to conditions of intense confinement, labor, exposure, sleep deprivation, and intimacy, as well as regulated his artistic output. These feats of physical and psychological endurance foregrounded the fraught relationship between “art time”—what he calls the time endured for each performance—as well as the space between them—“life time”—with processes of meticulous documentation serving as both evidence and extension of the work itself. Recasting time, struggle, and survival as both artistic medium and lived method, Hsieh transformed the parameters of performance and Conceptual art.

Tehching Hsieh: Lifeworks 1978–1999, installation view, Dia Beacon, New York, 2025–27. 

© Tehching Hsieh. Photo: Bill Jacobson Studio, New York

The exhibition at Dia Beacon covers 1978 through ’99, a period in which Hsieh enacted his five iconic One Year Performances followed by Tehching Hsieh 1986–1999 (Thirteen Year Plan). For each of the yearlong works, Hsieh lived locked in a wooden cage; punched a time clock in his studio every hour, on the hour; lived outside, navigating New York’s streets without shelter; was tied to another artist, Linda Montano, by an eight-foot rope; and refrained entirely from making, viewing, reading about, or speaking of art, respectively. During Hsieh’s final and longest performance, the artist made art but withheld it from the public for thirteen years. The retrospective will also mark the first presentation of documentation of his and Montano’s “Rope Piece,” offering unprecedented insight into their collaboration.

The exhibition is organized according to an architectural model, conceptualized by the artist over the course of a decade and adapted for Dia Beacon, that spatially conveys the relative “art time” and “life time.” Four equally sized galleries are dedicated to Hsieh’s first four One Year Performances and include extensive documentation and items that were integral to each piece. The fifth and sixth galleries are dedicated to “No Art Piece” (1985–86) and “Thirteen Year Plan” (1986–99), the former sized to represent a single year, and the latter stretching almost the entire length of Dia Beacon’s lower level to represent the thirteen-year duration, each gallery containing solely the posters and statements relating to the work. In navigating the exhibition, visitors move through the arc of Hsieh’s intertwined life and art practice, underscoring the extraordinary commitment that define them.

Tehching Hsieh, Tehching Hsieh 1986–1999 (Thirteen Year Plan), 1986–99. 

Tehching Hsieh: Lifeworks 1978–1999, installation view, Dia Beacon, New York, 2025–27. 

© Tehching Hsieh. Photo: Bill Jacobson Studio, New York

“The impact of Hsieh’s work is unparalleled. It is as urgent and relevant as when it was created decades ago. Presenting Hsieh’s Lifeworks at Dia Beacon offers an opportunity to understand the scale and rigor of his practice, establishing an expansive dialogue with Dia’s history and mission,” said Humberto Moro, Dia’s deputy director of program and the exhibition’s co-curator. “This landmark exhibition makes the immensity of his durational works tangible, allowing audiences to experience the intensity with which Hsieh understood the passage of time.” 

Adrian Heathfield, guest curator, remarks: “Again and again, Hsieh subjected himself to seemingly unbearable states to tease out what is elemental to life, to expose human existence as art. After 40 years in the shadows, these interrelated performances have finally found their ideal form to be reencountered. Walking the halls of Hsieh’s life, his relentless markings of time throw us back into a tense past and forcefully into the conditions of the present, the only time in which we can live.”

The exhibition is accompanied by a publication featuring new scholarship by Liv Cuniberti, Lia Gangitano, Moro, Brian Kuan Wood; a commissioned conversation between Heathfield and the artist; and never-before-seen archival materials, to be published in fall 2026.

Tehching Hsieh: Lifeworks 1978–1999 is co-curated by Humberto Moro, Dia’s deputy director of program, and Adrian Heathfield, guest curator, with Liv Cuniberti, curatorial assistant.

About Tehching Hsieh

Tehching Hsieh is renowned for major performance works that revolutionized the conceptual, physical, aesthetic, and temporal limits of the medium in the late 1970s and early ’80s. Hsieh dropped out of high school in 1967 and took up painting. Following three years of mandatory military service, he had his first solo show at the gallery of the American News Bureau, Taipei, in 1973. Shortly after, Hsieh stopped painting entirely and pivoted to performance. He began a group of works dealing with action and its traces in documents, culminating in Jump (1973), in which he recorded his fall from a second-story window, breaking both of his ankles. Starting in the late 1970s, Hsieh made a series of five One Year Performances. In 1986, he announced his “Thirteen Year Plan,” during which he would continue making art but not show it publicly. Since the millennium, Hsieh has exhibited elements of his oeuvre at major biennials, festivals, and museums, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and Tate Modern, London.  Hsieh lives and works in Brooklyn.

About Dia Art Foundation

Taking its name from the Greek word meaning “through,” Dia was established in 1974 with the mission to serve as a conduit for artists to realize ambitious new projects, unmediated by overt interpretation and uncurbed by the limitations of more traditional museums and galleries. Dia’s programming fosters contemplative and sustained consideration of a single artist’s body of work, and its collection is distinguished by the deep and longstanding relationships that the nonprofit has cultivated with artists whose work came to prominence particularly in the 1960s and ’70s. 

About the Exhibition

Dates: October 4, 2025-October 4, 2027

Venue: Dia Beacon

Courtesy of Dia Art Foundation, edited by CAFA ART INFO.