Tehching Hsieh: Lifeworks, 1978-1999

Liv Cuniberti is a curatorial assistant at Dia Art Foundation.

Lia Gangitano is the founder of the New York–based nonprofit art space,= Participant, Inc. and teaches at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. 

Adrian Heathfield is the author of Out of Now, a monograph on Tehching Hsieh, and the co-curator of Tehching Hsieh: Lifeworks 1978–1999 at Dia Beacon.

Tehching Hsieh was born in Nanzhou, Taiwan, in 1950. He is renowned for major performance works that revolutionized the conceptual, physical, aesthetic, and temporal limits of the medium in the late 1970s and early ’80s. Hsieh dropped out of high school in 1967 and took up painting. Following three years of mandatory military service, he had his first solo show at the gallery of the American News Bureau, Taipei, in 1973. Shortly after, Hsieh stopped painting entirely and pivoted to performance. He began with a group of works dealing with action and its traces in documents, culminating in Jump (1973), in which he recorded his fall from a second-story window, breaking both of his ankles. Starting in the late 1970s, Hsieh made a series of five One Year Performances . In 1986, he announced his  “Thirteen Year Plan,” during which he would continue making art but not show it publicly. Since the millennium, Hsieh has exhibited elements of his oeuvre at major biennials, festivals, and museums, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and Tate Modern, London. In 2017, Hsieh represented Taiwan at the Venice Biennale with his acclaimed exhibition Doing Time . Hsieh lives in Brooklyn.

Jessica Morgan is Nathalie de Gunzberg Director of Dia Art Foundation. She previously served as Daskalopoulos Curator, International Art, at Tate Modern from 2010 to 2015 and as a curator at Tate from 2002 to 2010. Morgan also was the Artistic Director of the 10th Gwangju Biennale (2014).

Humberto Moro is Deputy Director of Program at Dia Art Foundation. He was previously Deputy Director and Senior Curator at Museo Tamayo in Mexico City. He was also Curator of the 2021 Exposure section at EXPO Chicago; and from 2016 to 2022, Adjunct Curator at the SCAD Museum of Art in Savannah, Georgia.

Brian Kuan Wood is a writer and curator based in New York. In 2023, he was a co-curator of the Taipei Biennial, titled Small World. Wood is a founding editor of e-flux Journal.