He has broken his ankles, endured 365 days in a cell and faced down the 20th century’s worst winter. Yet he says he is not a masochist. We meet the man Marina Abramovich calls ‘the master’

For one year, beginning on 30 September 1978, Tehching Hsieh lived in an 11ft 6in x 9ft wooden cage. He was not permitted to speak, read or consume any media, but every day a friend visited with food and to remove his waste.

The vital context here is that this incarceration was voluntary: Hsieh is a Taiwanese-American artist whose chosen practice is performance art, undertaking durational “actions” for long periods. Marina Abramović has called him the “master” of the form. In 1980, seven months after the end of Cage Piece, Hsieh began another year-long work, Time Clock Piece, which required him to punch a factory-style clock-in machine in his studio, every hour of each day for 365 days.