Following Tehching Hsieh’s gift of 11 career-defining works to Dia in 2024, Tehching Hsieh: Lifeworks 1978–1999 is the first retrospective of the Taiwanese American artist’s radical performances. The exhibition covers 1978 through 1999, a period in which Hsieh enacted his five iconic One Year Performances followed by Tehching Hsieh 1986–1999 (Thirteen Year Plan). For each of the yearlong works, Hsieh lived locked in a wooden cage; punched a time clock in his studio every hour, on the hour; lived outside, navigating New York’s streets without shelter; was tied to another artist, Linda Montano, by an eight-foot rope; and refrained entirely from making, viewing, reading about, or speaking of art, respectively. During Hsieh’s final and longest performance, the artist made art but withheld it from the public for 13 years. The exhibition is organized according to an architectural model, conceptualized by the artist over the course of a decade and adapted for Dia Beacon, that spatially conveys the time endured for each performance as well as in between them.

Tehching Hsieh: Lifeworks 1978–1999 is accompanied by a publication edited by Humberto Moro and featuring new scholarship by Liv Cuniberti, Lia Gangitano, Moro, and Brian Kuan Wood; commissioned conversations between Adrian Heathfield and the artist, as well as Heathfield and Moro; and never-before-seen archival materials, to be published in fall 2026.