In the vibrant downtown Manhattan art scene of the late 1970s and early 1980s the
Taiwanese-American artist Tehching Hsieh made a series of extraordinary performance art works.
Between September 1978 and July 1986 Hsieh realized five separate one-year-long performance
pieces in which he conformed to simple but highly restrictive rules throughout each entire
year. Through the course of these lifeworks Hsieh moved from a year of solitary confinement in
a sealed cell to a year in which he punched a worker's time clock in his studio every hour on
the hour to a year spent living without shelter in Manhattan to a year in which he was tied by
an eight-foot rope to the artist Linda Montano and finally to a year of total abstention from
all art activities and influences. In 1986 Hsieh announced that he would spend the next
thirteen years making art but not showing it publicly. When this final lifework - an immense
act of self-affirmation and self-erasure - came to a close at the turn of the millennium he
tersely and enigmatically said that during this time he had simply kept himself alive. After
years of near-invisibility Hsieh collaborated with the British writer and curator Adrian
Heathfield to create this meticulous and visually arresting documentary record of the complete
body of Tehching Hsieh's performance projects from 1978 to 1999. This milestone volume is now
available again in a paperback edition featuring the full text and all the illustrations in
the hardcover with an updated list of Hsieh's exhibitions.
