Alice, a Taiwanese immigrant, struggles to create a project about the enigmatic downtown performance artist Tehching Hsieh and his monumental, year-long 1980s performance pieces. Meanwhile, she becomes the caretaker for her aging stepfather, a Vietnam vet whose dream of making traditional Chinese furniture dissolved in alcoholism and dementia. As Alice roots deeper into Hsieh’s radical use of time and his mysterious disappearance from the art world, her project starts metabolizing events from her own life. She wanders from subway rides to street protests, loses touch with a friend and tenderly observes her father’s slow decline.