Hsieh Teh-ching is an internationally acclaimed performance artist from Taiwan, famous for his extreme "One Year Performance Project," a life experience that is itself a product of the East-meets-West culture. Born in 1950 in Southern Taiwan, Hsieh began his studies in painting and sculpture in the local area, but there was no avant-garde behavioral art in Taiwan at that time. 1974, at the age of 24, Hsieh, with a desire for artistic freedom, traveled to the United States as a crew member of a ship and jumped off the ship when it docked in the U.S., and arrived at New York City, the center of contemporary art, to start his new life. During his first years in New York, he lived the life of an underground immigrant, working in restaurants and factories, while observing the dynamics of New York's avant-garde art scene. It was this marginalized situation and cultural impact that led him to develop a creative mindset based on the concept of "life as art", and from 1978 onwards, Tse began to implement a series of world-shaking "One Year Performance Art". In "One Year Performance - Cage" (1978-1979), he imprisoned himself in a small metal cage 39 36 40 40 41 40 36 42 43 44 42 44 44 43 43 40 39 42 40 42 40 45 45 5 for a year, not talking to the outside world, reading, watching TV, and exploring the world in a claustrophobic way. Instead of talking to the outside world, reading books, watching TV, and exploring the limits of his body and time in a self-secluded way, he was forced to go into a cage for a year. This kind of almost ascetic practice carries the meaning of Oriental meditation, and at the same time, it is a subversion of the usual forms of the Western art world. In the following work, One Year Performance - Punch Card (1980-1981), he punched the time card every hour, day after day, for a year, and eventually left thousands of photographs of himself punching the time card, transforming the abstract concept of "time" into visible traces of his labor. Such stringent self-restraint reflects the emphasis on resilience and cultivation in Eastern cultures, but it also poses a challenge to Western audiences: where is the boundary of art? Western performance artists such as Marina Abramovic have praised Xie Deqing as a "master" in this field, arguing that his work sets a benchmark for sustainable performance art.

In his subsequent projects, Tse continued to explore the proposition that "survival is art": One Year of Performance - Outdoors (1981-1982) saw him wandering the streets for a year without going indoors, while One Year of Performance - Art in the Air (1985-1986) declared that he would not engage in any artistic activity for a year, taking "not doing" itself as art. One Year of Performance - Art in the Air (1985-1986) declared that he would not engage in any artistic activity for one year, and that "non-doing" was art in itself. The radical nature of these concepts stems from his unique perspective as an immigrant from the East on the margins of Western society: he has physically questioned the relationship between art and life, and between Western civilization and individual freedom. It is worth mentioning that in 1983-1984, Xie collaborated with the American artist Linda Montano on the project "One Year's Embrace" (Rope), in which the two lived together for one year without touching each other on an eight-foot long rope. This is his only collaborative work, and it embodies cross-cultural exchange - a dialogue between an Eastern man and a Western woman artist under equal constraints, resulting in a collision of ideas about intimate relationships and personal boundaries. At that time, Xie Deqing's works were mostly silent and little known. However, after the 1990s, when he returned to his ordinary life after 13 years of long projects, the literature of his past works was gradually rediscovered and highly evaluated by the art world; in 2009, a large-scale retrospective exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum of Art in New York presented a complete overview of his five one-year projects, which caused a sensation; and in 2017, an archive of his works was exhibited at the Taiwan Pavilion of the Venice Biennale under the title of Doing Time, which emphasized his concern for "time". In 2017, the Taiwan Pavilion at the Venice Biennale presented an archive of his works under the title "Doing Time", emphasizing his unique interpretation of "time". In these exhibitions, Western audiences were able to reacquaint themselves with this reticent Chinese artist, realizing that as early as the 1980s he had foreshadowed many of the key issues in contemporary art with his extreme forms. Using his own life story as artistic material, Tse integrates the Eastern spirit of stoicism with the Western concept of individual breakthroughs. Recognized as an "ascetic artist," his creations have crossed cultural barriers and have had a global impact on the concepts and behaviors of future generations. Through Hsieh Teh-ching, we see an Eastern artist practicing his artistic ideals in a foreign land in an almost fundamentalist manner, which ultimately leads to an in-depth dialogue between Eastern and Western artistic concepts.