VENICE.- In Manhattan’s downtown art scene in the late 1970s and early 80s, a young Taiwanese artist Tehching Hsieh made an exceptional series of artworks. Working outside the art world’s sanctioned spaces and economies Hsieh embarked on five separate yearlong performances. In each, he made a strict rule that governed his behaviour for the entire year. The performances were unprecedented in terms of their use of physical difficulty over extreme durations and in their absolute conception of art as a living process.

Doing Time exhibits two of Hsieh’s One Year Performances together for the first time, assembling his accumulated records and artefacts into detailed installations. In One Year Performance 1980-1981, Hsieh subjected himself to the dizzying discipline of clocking on to a worker’s time clock on the hour, every hour, for a whole year. In One Year Performance 1981-1982, Hsieh inhabited a further sustained deprivation: he remained outside for a year without taking any shelter. Each work convenes different methods of documentation, challenging what it might mean to archive a life. Together these monumental performances of subjection mount an intense and affective discourse on human existence, its relation to systems of control, to time and to nature. Hsieh’s fugitive presence – traced throughout – speaks both of the abject conditions and ingenuity of survival for those who have nothing. During the course of his One Year Performances Hsieh was an illegal immigrant.

The exhibition also takes its spectators back to three of Hsieh’s previously unseen works: short performances and photographs, all made in Taipei in 1973, before his emigration. For Road Repair, Hsieh wandered the city streets with his camera searching for instances where the simple task of repairing holes in the road had led to striking abstract compositions in spilled tar. In Exposure – one of Hsieh’s earliest performances reconstructed and re-filmed especially for this exhibition – the artist pursued his interest in serial records, exposing photographic papers to the elements and filming their transformation. In Jump, a final work made before leaving Taiwan, Hsieh recorded his fall from a second floor window and its shattering conclusion. These early works trace Hsieh’s emerging concerns, later made manifest in epic durations: environment and time, qualities of existence, images and documents as frail remainders of an ineffable life force. A short documentary film, Outside Again, made by renowned photographer Hugo Glendinning and curator Adrian Heathfield, accompanies the exhibition. Shot on location in Taipei and New York, the film returns Hsieh at the age of sixty-five to the original sites of his performances in the 1970s and 80s to make a critical meditation on the resonances of this work.

A person of profound actions and succinct words, Hsieh explains the philosophy behind his art making: “Life is a life sentence. Life is passing time. Life is freethinking.” Heathfield sees the significance of Hsieh’s oeuvre as arising from his outsider status in the art world and his years as an illegal immigrant in New York. His work constantly invokes the qualities of migrant experience: subjugation, precariousness and the struggle to stay alive. “The performances speak to and from the life of those who have little and live at the edges of society,” Heathfield says. Of Hsieh’s tireless endurance of physical extremity the curator asserts, “each of these works is about forms of bare existence in which resilience is pitched against adversity, and the fugitive qualities of life are valued in their passing.” Heathfield also stresses Doing Time’s “forceful address to contemporary conditions.” Hsieh’s art, he argues, “was incredibly prescient in its understanding that the technologies of capitalism would capture, exploit and accelerate life itself, turning sentient experience into a commodity.” A simple paradox haunts all of Hsieh’s One Year Performances: they are ‘anti-productive’. Hsieh works excessively hard in order to make very little, to record the wasting of time.