STUDY ME

Study Me is a conceptual performance work by the artist Tehching Hsieh, executed as the second of his Five One Year Performances between 1980 and 1981. During this twelve-month period, Hsieh committed to clocking in on a time card every hour, on the hour, twenty-four hours a day, at his studio in New York City. The work served as a grueling exploration of the constraints of time, labor, and the endurance of the human body, capturing the mundane yet punishing repetition of a worker's life distilled into its most basic, clock-governed essence.

The physical documentation of the piece consists of a series of time cards, a film of the process, and a series of photographs that archive every hour of the year. The aesthetic is intentionally stark and documentary in nature, stripped of traditional artistic flourish to emphasize the reality of the experience. Upon its completion, the work was widely received as a seminal piece of endurance art, challenging the boundaries between the artist’s life and the rigid temporal structures of industrial labor.