Meet Tehching Hsieh, the Taiwan-born artist who lived in a cage for a year

"This is home," artist Tehching Hsieh proclaimed proudly.

- Julia Halperin

He was sitting on the edge of a discoloured mattress inside a 2.7m by 3.5m cage. He occupied this tiny space from Sept 30, 1978, to Sept 30, 1979, as part of a performance artwork that has become the stuff of legend.

He did not talk, read, write, listen to the radio or leave the enclosure for one year.

Almost five decades later, Hsieh cheerfully offered a reporter a tour of the cage, which he was reassembling in the basement of Dia Beacon, a factory turned museum in the Hudson Valley of New York. It is a centrepiece of his first retrospective, which runs for two years.

Hsieh, now 74, stopped making art in 2000. He spent the next decade thinking about how to present his radical, exacting and still poorly understood work to the world. It took him 15 more years to find a home for the retrospective.

Inside the cage, illuminated by a single lightbulb, there is a sink, a mirror and the same bar of soap and tube of toothpaste he used during his year of isolation. A friend, artist Cheng Wei Kuong, delivered his meals and removed his waste through a small opening between the bars every day.

Two months in, sick of eating nothing but Chinese broccoli with beef and rice, he threw the food on the ground to communicate his displeasure.

On the back wall of the cage are tally marks Hsieh carved with a nail clipper to record each passing day. The lines start off scratchy and raw and become progressively sharper proof, he insists, that his thinking became clearer over time.

Hsieh has said that this work, One Year Performance 1978-1979 (Cage Piece), shows how individuals can experience psychological freedom even in the face of intense physical constraints.