PRESENTER:
Imagine spending an entire year of your life, alone, in a cage not much bigger than the gallery space you’re in now. Totally alone, with nothing but your thoughts.
TEHCHING HSIEH:
Hello, my name is Tehching Hsieh. I was born in 1950. In 1974, July 13, I jumped ship to America as an illegal immigrant.
PRESENTER:
Tehching Hsieh is a performance artist. Born in Taiwan, aged twenty-four, he started a new life in New York. Here, he would channel his feelings of isolation and disorientation in a new land into ground-breaking, yearlong performances. His Cage Piece was the first.
TEHCHING HSIEH:
So, my first one-year performance, Cage Piece—I lived in a cage. I do not do conversation with people, no reading, no writing, no listening to radio, or watching television.
The piece is not political, a symbol about the prisoner or incarceration. Rather, my own isolation. One year time: one year is the earth around the sun, it’s a human life in basic unit, to talk about things over and over, in life.
PRESENTER:
Tehching Hsieh has selected specific pieces of documentation for this M+ display which help illustrate the mental strain this piece put him under. There’s a calendar, marked with the nineteen days members of the public could observe the silent piece. In photographs, you can see how long his hair grew over the course of the year, and an example of the certificates he had a lawyer sign to prove he wasn’t cheating. Other photographs show some of his more personal coping mechanisms.
TEHCHING HSIEH:
Another picture to see, I sit in the corner, in the cage, I sit in that corner. To make believe that’s home, and the other three corners, it’s outside. So, I can go out, take a walk in three corners, and then come home. So, I make it feel that my space is bigger in the cage inside.
The last image is, I do scratch every day, mark in the wall so you can see how many days I’ve passed, how many days to go. So, in all the piece, what I want to say, what I’m thinking is that it’s a life sentence, life is passing time, life is free thinking.
