After attending Tehching Hsieh's lecture at SAIC

Tehching Hsieh’s art is personal and shockingly provocative in many ways. But most of all is the mysterious intention. Going through his five one-year projects and a 13-year project, one would naturally wonder what is the point of doing this—locking oneself in a cage, being outside without a shelter, punching a clock every hour, tying to another person, and not making art—each for an entire year. What kind of person would devote a quarter if not more of his life doing something like this? What kind of drive or pursuit is worth spending the peak of one’s lifetime in this constrained way? 

A photo document from Hsieh's first one-year project in the cage.

Because of the outrageous practice of Hsieh’s performance pieces, his intention is easily being overlooked. People are wondering more about the feasibility and the strength of completing his projects because this is on the surface and is the most direct myth of the work. However, after reading Franzer Ward’s article Alien Duration: Tehching Hsieh, 1978-99, which focuses on the continuity of the theme of “illegal alien identity” in his works, I became doubtful about how much his identity as once an “illegal alien” really participate in his performance pieces.  To me, even though this is a reasonable approach to interpret his work, it is not really such a predominant focus since it is overly political and downplays the artist’s incomparable effort and courage in doing these pieces. Hence I no longer feel it is important to find out what the message behind each piece is. I am more interested in the act itself and what comes out of it rather than what is possibly implanted before its happening.

My feeling was testified by Hsieh’s lecture at SAIC today, during which he pulled out his personal motto: “Life is a life sentence; life is a passing time; life is freethinking” several times. I never saw this anywhere else and when it appeared on the big screen it suddenly solved many questions that I had in mind and confirmed my “hypothesis” that it is more significant to interpret his artworks “as it is.” Hsieh used graphics to strictly and carefully divide his life into “art time” and “life time,” which answered my other question about how he could have such determination to devote a long period of his lifetime into doing self-restrained and repetitive work that others seldom dare to try out. By living in separate “art time” and “life time,” his art should not be associated with his way of life. As a result, there is no need to feel that he has made himself suffer by creating these performance pieces. In fact, maybe these are not suffer at all. It is the artist’s way to pursue “freethinking” and to experience the “passing of time” as an art form. This thought was further deepened in my mind after seeing Hsieh on the stage, being a very delightful man in his 60s, making comparison between his seemingly repetitive and dull performances with Snoopy comic strips, joking about the appearance of his New York peer Ai Weiwei in one photo when Ai was a thin, young man, and his down-to-earth and approachable attitude when talking to SAIC students after the lecture. 

Hsieh (center) surrounded by SAIC students after the lecture at SAIC. (Photo by me)

 Tehching Hsieh was surrounded by SAIC students, mostly from China and Taiwan, after the lecture, to give autographs and have photos taken with him. It was my first time seeing a visiting artist at SAIC to have such "popularity" after the event (I'm just a first year grad so I don't know what was like in the years before). I guess part of the reason is that he is Chinese (or Tainwanese if you insist) and even feels more comfortable speaking Chinese than English that attracts Chinese/Taiwanese students. Another reason is definitely his legendary pieces of art that make people automatically in awe of him as a person. And finally his surprising personality in real life, which is quite different from what you would anticipate based on the theme of his works, makes people want to approach him and just have some more informal conversation with him.

Communicate directly is the key

The study of contemporary art seems to follow this trend: when an unfamiliar artwork appears in a country outside of its own, it is likely that it will be studied based on the artist’s country of origin and the culture where he or she comes from. It is also commonly seen that academic and journalistic writings focus on the artist’s background as the primary source of understanding the artworks. It is true that artists from countries of political repression and social conflicts often have this foreign “aura” to the viewers in the rest of the world. For example, the viewers may have only seen news about these countries that are always at war and thus make natural connection between the artist’s personal, artistic, and political experience. However, this approach is not the most respectful one and it also limits the viewers’ exploration of such less unfamiliar art.

As Erin Gleeson writes in the article Mutualism for the Future, “It is unfortunate that we—influenced by the structures in which we learn and work—seem to have forgotten to leave space for wonder; to not understand is necessary before we can understand… Concepts and trends in contemporary art remain a ‘foreigner’s language’ in most parts of the world.”  Though her article mainly speaks to curators, this statement well defines the problem of the mainstream study of contemporary art. Oftentimes the study of an artwork from an unfamiliar place (I’m not making the assumption of Western vs. Eastern because this happens to almost all the art world practitioners when they encountered something new) is occupied by preexisting knowledge and assumption in the beholder’s own cultural context. We study an artwork based on what we have already learned and willfully apply to this less familiar art. Consequently we see a lot of symbolisms and make our judgment even before the meaning of the art is revealed. This may in part due to the postmodernist world where the prejudgment of a lot of signs and symbols makes nothing really “unique” and interpretations become universal. But this is not really a case. We seemed to forget that art is first and foremost about the artists themselves not what the interpreter thinks it can be connected to.

Therefore, as Gleeson also suggests, “for a mutualistic approach to working with artists in peripheral countries, curators need to put more effort in understanding and communicating context and content, whether for emerging domestic audiences or established international audience. We must move beyond our desks, computers and smart phones, as well as beyond out existing knowledge to better understand an artist and place.” In a word, communication with the artist is the key to better study the artwork. Thus we can also translate the foreign work accurately to the audience from outside the artist’s region. This is not only applicable to curators, but also to art historians and art journalists, as any artwork is worthy to be treated in its own right.

Artists: get to the center of the trauma?

The other day I read an article Pilgrimage to May Lai: Social Memory and the Making of Art by Carol Becker. It is about a group of SAIC students went to visit My Lai, where the massacre happened in 1968. One thing left me a deep impression is the contrasted reaction of student-artists before and after visiting the My Lai site. Becker wrote that, on the way to My Song, faculty and students were enjoying the view and photographing or filming, “[b]ut the road back, although physically the same (there is only one north/south route through Vietnam), was not the road previously traveled. On the road back, there was silence.” I was empathetic about these student-artists’ sensitive minds that responded directly to an actual site of trauma. Unlike the Vietnam War Memorial in D.C., in My Song, the site where the actual massacre happened, what left was only headstones where houses once stood and the names of people who once lived inside. However, this emptiness was more powerful and striking than building a magnificent monument because of the voiceless, powerless, and blatant showing of relics of a reality that was too vague to the younger generations from the U.S. yet too difficult to ignore as a historical fact that impacted both countries’ war history.

I highlight the “younger generation” because those who were born after the event could hardly, if not never, experience the same shock and empathy that was experienced by people who lived through it. Yet by seeing what was left at the site, the silence of the relics calls for the visitors’ powerful imaginative interpretation. Especially as the young people who were perhaps more familiar with the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington D.C. which mainly commemorates the other side of the story, seeing the comparatively deserted land in a village of Viet Nam spoke a lot more to them about what they had heard but hadn’t experienced; what they had imagined but hadn’t seen. This experience was not unlike when the U.S. military hid the massacre to its people in the U.S. until it was revealed a year later. For the visiting students, to experience the history of My Lai firsthand outweighed everything they had learned at home because no matter how refined were the knowledge, it could hardly enable the students to feel the war from a different angle, a different mindset.

Thus, the firsthand experience and its concurrent shock and silence are when art really comes into play with politics. As Becker wrote, “Why do artists and writers, in particular, need to go to the actual place of trauma? What is it they hope to find? A quality of light? Past images juxtaposed to contemporary life?” She went on to answer that, “If artists and writers are unique in their relationship to such journeys, it is that they are willing to bear witness and to do it by using such remnants to create an event or physical entity to mark their experience: a work of art, be it an essay, a poem, a film, a performance. However ephemeral, they will find a way to alchemize their internalization of the event into a further manifestation, filtered through the particularity of individual consciousness. In this way their work becomes interpretation, a gesture of remembering.”

Using her statement to reiterate my idea about younger artists, or artists who had never been to a foreign culture or site to actually get in there and into the history, the power of imagining by touching the real “otherness” surely provokes an reinterpretation and reinvestment of their artistic creativity. The history then becomes more real (not necessarily have to be exactly accurate) to the artists’ own growth and realization of the political content in their art. This is also when art-making becomes a plausible responsibility to the authentic and engaging hearts of the artists, as well as to the society in general. To me this is the real job of art-making in today’s world: instead of focusing on the personal, to connect personal with the larger consensus in the society is more important and appreciable.