Tehching Hsieh is a New York- based
performance artist originally from southern Taiwan. He dropped out of high
school to become a painter, and not long after his first art show at the
gallery of the American News Bureau in Taiwan, he stopped painting altogether
and started to create performance art.
He is
most well known for his “One Year Performances,” which are yearlong
performances known for being physically and mentally taxing in response to the
conformity of industrial labor and capitalism. His work, “One Year Performance
(1980-1981)” shows the actual evidence of labor he went through. He collected
documentary evidence of said work: 365 punch cards, 365 filmstrips, the plain grey uniform he wore, and a 16mm movie he
made, “compressing the year into six minutes, witness statements attesting to
his strict routine and the time clock.”
I think Hsieh’s devotion to showing the effects that
capitalism has on people who are slaves to the system is interesting and even
admirable. I know that his art doesn’t just cover this subject, but it really
shows the limits of the human body and what it can do given certain
circumstances.
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