Tehching Hsieh on Art, Life and Pain - How the artist broke with tradition and broke a couple bones, too.

From a young age, Tehching Hsieh knew he wanted to follow his dream of becoming an artist. The native of Taiwan had read the works of literary greats Franz Kafka and Fyodor Dostoyevsky and marveled at the paintings of Vincent Van Gogh.

His desire to pursue the arts was so strong that by age 17 he dropped out of high school.

“I believed that artists do not need to go through school education, especially the education method in Taiwan,” the artist told the Sampan in a wide-ranging recent interview.

Like many artists, however, Hsieh struggled to gain attention while he was actively creating. But his work gained more praise once he retired at the turn of the century.

Hsieh grew up in Taiwan with 14 siblings in what he described as a “small society.”

“My father is very strict, and my mother is very kind,” he called. “It was a good life.”

He began painting and painted for four years before becoming disillusioned with that form of expression. “I felt that it became more and more empty, and I could not continue. So, I started using cameras and Super 8 video cameras to record, which later evolved into performance.” This is when Hsieh began performing what he called “actions.” His first well-known action was called “Jump Piece,” where Hsieh documented himself jumping from a window on the second story of a building. He broke both of his ankles in the process, causing pain that he still bothers him to this day. He says that he never fully recovered from the injuries caused by the work.

His community did not seem to understand his performance. “People around me looked at me coldly and didn’t say anything.” His mother was mostly concerned about whether he would ever be able to walk again.

Hsieh describes the contemporary art scene in Taiwan in the 1970s as “very conservative. … I knew that I could only learn and experience new things in New York.” Which he describes as the “art capital of the world.”

He moved to New York City and lived as an undocumented immigrant for 14 years. Most of his works were created during this period of time.

“Because I had no status,” he said, “I worked as a dishwasher or cleaner in a Chinese restaurant.”

He also worked in construction later, relying on the jobs to pay for his living expenses. “The salary is also very low, but I can turn this difficulty into the power of art.”

Hsieh was granted amnesty in 1988. “I only knew that I could go back to Taiwan to visit my family for the first time and that it was legal to start filing taxes in the following days. Other realities didn’t change much. Being able to do art creation is the real change.”

Hsieh began devoting his time to regular long-lasting performances, several taking as long as a year to complete. He often shaved his head before a performance started, documenting the passage of time with photos, his growing hair a visceral reminder of the time that had gone by during his endeavors. Hsieh described the decision to shave his head as “an insight that an artist needs to have, because one year from shaving his head to growing up is a visual and real passage of time.”

There were six main long works that Hsieh completed between 1978 and 2000. These works deal with questions of waste, labor, and endurance. They involve extreme measures – including one piece in which Hsieh did not enter indoor spaces for an entire year, one where he punched a time clock every hour, and one where he lived in a cage.

Much of Hsieh’s art is open to interpretation, and when asked how he handles people assigning motivations to his work that he didn’t intend, he said it was expected.

“I have said that my works are not autobiographical, but focus on the universality of people. Although I have my own subjective views on the work, I also allow others to have different views. I think being open to different views is the basic principle of exploring the essence.”

Hsieh quit making art in the year 2000 when he realized he “couldn’t create in an art form just staying alive ... thinking freely kept me alive.”

He has been described by renowned performance artist, Marina Abramović as “the Master.” Hsieh responded to this praise by saying, “Marina, she is a great artist, and she is very confident in herself in judging things. It is an honor for her to appreciate my art. It is an honor for me to (get) such compliments. She is completely out of good intentions and hopes that more people will recognize my art, because I am a junior and not many people know about it.”

When asked about what he wants his legacy to be, Hsieh, now in his mid-70s, mused, “Art has its own life. When time has passed, only art documents stay as a trace for the work to remain. How long a work can survive is a natural. I can’t expect anything.”