Serving time with performance art

Punching the Time Clock [Photo by Michael Shen/provided to chinadaily.com.cn]

In the Heathfield interview Hsieh said his main influences were Dostoyevsky, Kafka, Nietzsche, Sisyphus, contemporary art and his mother. When addressing his work he said, "To get the message of my art, an audience's presence is not vital. As long as audiences know my concept and the real action I did, they can use their own experiences and imagination to feel these artworks."

Limited public access while he performed his work could be one reason why he received such word-of-mouth notoriety as it was happening and afterwards, because many were not able to witness it. When performance art in China began to take off in the 1990's, his work was heavily influential on mainland artists then just as much as it is now.

Tinari said, "His work in the last five years has undergone not a reassessment because it's always been highly regarded by people in the art world, but it's undergone an immense popularization as institutions start to think more about art from Asia and as institutions in Asia start to think more about the history of contemporary art."

The exhibition covers a room with photos and time cards. The first photo shows Hsieh with a clean-shaven head dated April 11, 1980, and the last photo shows him with long hair dated April 11, 1981. At the top of each strip of photos is a time card showing the times when he punched the clock each day.

Another feature of the exhibit consists of a six-minute video made up of one photo of Hsieh taken every day during the performance. Each photo takes up one second of time and traces the artist’s physical transformation over the course of the project. The video can be challenging to watch from start to finish but it gives the viewer a taste of the brevity of this boundary-pushing work.

Regarding Time Clock Piece Hsieh has said, "In one hour I could not do much, my mind and my body have to be totally concentrated on time. Even if I were talking to someone I would be thinking, 'I have to go and punch the time clock.' I could not miss that. I couldn't use my energy too much."

For the video, click here