T’s Art issue looks at the iconoclastic artists who have found power in saying no.

On the street, two big-shouldered N.Y.P.D. officers, one Black, one white, are arguing with an Asian man on the sidewalk. It looks like the 1970s — the man’s got a Bowie-like haircut and he’s wearing a black turtleneck. The cops begin to manhandle him. He wails, saying that he doesn’t want to go inside the police station and sounding as if that would be a worse fate than any pain the police might inflict. The cops haul him through a green door anyway.

The scene is from footage documenting Tehching Hsieh’s “Outdoor Piece,” a yearlong performance project created 43 years ago, when he was 30. It is one of six artworks, or as Hsieh calls them, “lifeworks,” that will comprise a single installation opening at the upstate New York museum Dia Beacon in October 2025. Hsieh’s premise for the work, like for much of his work from this era, was simple in theory, though in practice it required remarkable feats of endurance: He would spend twelve months outside, never going indoors.

ImageHsieh in his apartment and studio in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn. On the wall on the left is a replica of the time clock the artist punched into every hour, 24 hours a day, for 12 months during “One Year Performance 1980-81.” Credit...Tommy Kha

While planning the performance, Hsieh worked with an attorney to craft a quasi-legal framework to define the conditions of the piece.

I, Tehching Hsieh, plan to do a one year performance piece.I shall stay OUTDOORS for one year, never go inside.I shall not go in to a building, subway, train, car, airplane, ship, cave, tent.I shall have a sleeping bag.The performance shall begin on September 26, 1981 at 2 P.M. and continue until September 26, 1982 at 2 P.M.-Tehching HsiehNew York City

When he was arrested on May 3, 1982, the artist had already survived one of the coldest New York winters on record. That morning, he was drinking tea on the stoop of a building at Hubert and West streets in TriBeCa. A man emerged from the building and asked him to move. Hsieh said he would when he’d finished the tea. The man hit him with a metal club; Hsieh took out a nunchaku and fought back. The assailant reported Hsieh’s defense as an attack, and the cops arrested Hsieh, resulting in 15 hours of jail time.

The time in jail was the only time he broke the rules. When Hsieh was brought before a judge, in part for possessing an illegal weapon, his lawyer fought for him to stay outside the courthouse, to which the judge, who’d read an article in The Wall Street Journal on Hsieh’s work, agreed. “I don’t see any reason to bring him indoors,” he said. “These days anything is art. Staying outside may be art. I’m getting old and nothing surprises me.” He ruled Hsieh guilty of disorderly conduct; the sentence was “time served.”

Hsieh is now 73 years old. The Taiwan-born artist, who’s made his home in New York City for 50 years, is compact, energetic and could be 20 years younger. He greets me at his building in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, in the artist’s uniform of a black T-shirt and jeans.

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