Mimetic Experience: The Performance of Citizenship in Tehching Hsieh’s work

While Tehching Hsieh was an undocumented worker in the United States for fourteen years, he created five one-year-long performances. In One Year Performance 1980-1981, he punched a time clock every hour, every day, for an entire year. The punch, alongside its photographic documentations, does more than record Hsieh’s identity within a system that would have required a similar documentative process had he been a legal resident. This overcompensation becomes a powerful critique of the state’s refusal to assimilate undocumented immigrants. Through Foucault, Agamben, and McNay, I examine how this mimetic act reinstates Hsieh’s identity through its self-regulating impulse. I argue that the tension between Hsieh’s systemic exclusion and self-producing performance becomes a site of resistance – one that resonates with contemporary immigration politics.