This is the second of two reflections Momus published on the occasion of Tehching Hsieh: Lifeworks 1978–1999, on view at Dia Beacon through 2027. Find the first, by Eliza Swann, here.
On New Year’s Eve in 1986, the performance artist Tehching Hsieh released a written statement: For the next thirteen years, he would make art but show none of it publicly. By the mid-aughts, the artist had earned underground notoriety, if not fame and fortune, for a series of mind-bending durational performance works. Among them: locking himself in a cage, and punching a time clock every hour. Each of these pieces took place over a span of one year. Tehching Hsieh 1986-1999 (Thirteen Year Plan) (1986–99) would stretch to the eve of the new millennium—and lead him to both the headwaters and terminus of his philosophical inquiry into art and life.
Thirteen Year Plan is on public display as a major installation for the first time as part of Life Works 1978–1999, a retrospective of Hsieh’s time-based performances pieces at Dia Beacon in New York. It was the work I was most curious to see.
Partly because there technically isn’t anything to see. Hsieh has long expressed his discontent with the fact that the ephemeral nature of performance art leaves us, in retrospect, gazing at what he calls the “trace evidence” of his work—the photographs, posters, film, and physical artifacts that he has nevertheless meticulously safeguarded over the years. Many of these objects, ranging from the toothbrush he used while caged to the grimy pair of jeans he wore during One Year Performance 1981–1982 (Outdoor Piece) (1981–82), the year he spent entirely outdoors, are on display at the show.
Dia Beacon is a former Nabisco box-printing factory in the Hudson Valley. Its basement gallery—all thirty thousand square feet of it—makes it one of the few arts institutions in the world capable of housing the retrospective in line with Hsieh’s conceptual design. To heighten the tangibility of time and override the primacy of artifacts and documentation, he has said he needed to use the “language” of the museum: three-dimensional space. The gallery is divided into what he calls “art time” (time committed to making the performance pieces, each of which occupies a separate room in the exhibit) and “life time” (the time spent doing everything else, represented by the corridors between rooms).
Tehching Hsieh, One Year Performance 1981–1982 (Outdoor Piece), 1981–82. Performance view, New York, September 26, 1981–September 26, 1982. © Tehching Hsieh. Photo: Tehching Hsieh, courtesy Dia Art Foundation.
Thirteen Year Plan, which occupies seven thousand square feet, roughly a quarter of the entire exhibition space, is an installation without anything in it, stripped down to a concrete floor and two preexisting rows of massive pillars.
For the uninitiated, the empty room can come off as a cosmic joke. When I ran into the writer and critic Sukhdev Sandhu on the street recently, he told me he had taken his class at New York University to the show. One student, he said, literally stamped his foot in outrage, “like Rumpelstiltskin.”
Don’t expect any help from Hsieh, whose position is: “I do the work, and the audience does the thinking.”
Walking through the length of the installation, I thought about the silence surrounding those thirteen years. True to his word, the artist has never shown any artwork from that period, if any art was made. Some biographical facts have emerged: He attempted to make his way to Alaska, doing odd jobs for money along the way, and made it as far as Seattle before deciding to return home to New York City. We know that in 1988 he was naturalized and became a US citizen under an amnesty law passed by President Reagan—a provision that seems unimaginable amid today’s brutal Immigration and Customs Enforcement policies.
I thought, inevitably, about the slippage of my own time, the past few years I’ve spent thrashing around in the Google doc of my would-be second novel. I’ve joked to friends that, in the way some writers are deemed “writer’s writers”—authors who are underappreciated by the broader reading public but totemic to writers themselves—Hsieh is the novelist’s performance artist. His grueling endurance works speak directly to the loneliness of long-haul projects, the uncertainty, the necessary delusions, the trigger finger hovering above self-abort.
Installation view of Tehching Hsieh: Lifeworks 1978–1999, Dia Beacon, New York, 2025–27. © Tehching Hsieh. Photo: Bill Jacobson Studio, New York.
Hsieh has said one of his favorite directors is Andrei Tarkovsky. A theory: The installation of Thirteen Year Plan was partly inspired by Tarkovsky’s Stalker, a 1979 film in which two men and their guide journey through a ruined, supernatural landscape in search of the fabled “Zone.” In that Zone is a room with the power to fulfill their deepest, unspoken desires. The desires themselves are not important. What’s alluring is the Zone itself, the idea of a Zone, that there exists a place we can go to experience transfiguration.
When Hsieh entered the zone that was Thirteen Year Plan, he emerged with a conviction: He would make no more art. At some point in those thirteen years, the line between “art time” and “life time” dissolved.
Was arriving at this philosophical vanishing point a source of tranquility or sadness—or both? Few artists, with the exceptions of Philip Roth and rock bands monetizing their farewell tours, announce their retirement from their craft. There’s a reason: We keep chasing the dream of the masterpiece, and we keep anticipating how the work will be received once it’s out of our hands.
There is freedom in letting go of the audience, especially when you are in the wilderness of putting one word after another, one day of the performance piece after another. Hsieh stopped making art after Thirteen Year Plan to guide us to something greater, a state he calls “free thinking.” It is a force both constitutive and larger than art itself. Free thinking, our mind’s ability to divine and roam expansively, is the ultimate liberation; it belongs to all of us whether, as Hsieh says, we are in a prisoner in a cage or a king in a palace.
Poster for Tehching Hsieh’s Tehching Hsieh 1986–1999 (Thirteen Year Plan), 1986–99. © Tehching Hsieh. Courtesy Dia Art Foundation.
Maybe Hsieh has become the eponymous Stalker, guiding others into the Zone. Maybe he now lives permanently in the Zone.
I thought of the opening sentences to Namwali Serpell’s 2023 novel, The Furrows: “I don’t want to tell you what happened. I want to tell you how it felt.” In the book, a girl and her younger brother go to the beach, and the boy goes missing. But Serpell is less concerned with plot, or even narrative logic, than with showing how that awful loss rears its head, through uncanny encounters and events, in the intervening years. These words become a refrain, an incantation through this vortex.
With the installation of Thirteen Year Plan—by turning time into space and space into time, and crucially, by having our bodies linger through both—Hsieh, like Serpell, has found a form to tell us how it felt beyond intellectual reckoning.
I felt the simultaneous weight and the weightlessness of time.
In 2022, I published a novel in which Hsieh’s work and life feature prominently. When I shared an early draft with my partner, he told me I hadn’t spent nearly enough time with Thirteen Year Plan. He was right. From a narrative perspective, describing that last piece was a struggle, a black hole: There was no there there. But I did end up working my way through it, entering a zone, bending it to my own design.
Thirteen Year Plan embodies a paradox. Even as it appears to disavow the necessity of an audience, the piece nevertheless demonstrates the tensile power of the conduit between artist and audience. That contradiction is embedded in art-making itself, whether in a novel, a choreography, or a jazz composition: You must banish any thought of public reception in order to focus on the unalloyed act of making. Yet the dream of the audience is what gets most of us to the finish line. It certainly makes free thinking less lonely.
