Nearly 40 Years After She Walked the Great Wall of China, Marina Abramović Returns to the Country With a New Exhibition

Almost four decades ago, world-renowned performance artist Marina Abramović walked the Great Wall of China—meeting her collaborator and lover, the artist Ulay, in the middle. Now, Abramović and her work are coming back to China in a new exhibition at the Modern Art Museum Shanghai.

Titled “Transforming Energy,” the show is inspired by that walk along the wall. It will spotlight new pieces alongside more than 1,000 images of Abramović and Ulay’s journey in 1988.

“I am returning to China with great excitement with this exhibition, which is a result of that experience and includes a new body of work,” says Abramović in a statement.

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The artist’s work has been exhibited at museums all over the world—but never before in China. “Transforming Energy” has now taken up residence on three floors of the Shanghai museum.

The immersive exhibition focuses on “artworks and objects that actively engage the audience, inviting their participation,” per the museum. It will include numerous new pieces featuring crystals, which “serve as a source of transformative energy for both the artist and the visitors.”

Born in Belgrade, Yugoslavia (now Serbia) in 1946, Abramović made a name for herself through her provocative performance art. In the 1970s, in a series of numbered performance pieces titled Rhythms, Abramović lay down inside a blazing frame of a wooden star, took seizure-inducing drugs and repeatedly cut her hand with a knife. In one of her most famous pieces, Rhythm 0 (1974), she provided onlookers with various objects and allowed them free access to her body.

“I wanted to know where the mental, physical [and] emotional limits were,” Abramović tells Tatler’s Aaina Bhargava. “I wanted to know everything about [the body].”

In the 1970s, Abramović moved to Amsterdam, where she met Uwe Laysiepen, who was known as Ulay. The pair would live and work together for more than a decade. In collaborative pieces, the artists tied their hair together and ran naked into each other. In a famous 1980 work called Rest Energy, Abramović held a stretched bow while Ulay held its real arrow, poised to shoot.

“Our relation was a big love story,” Abramović tells the Guardian’s Sam Wollaston. “It was difficult; it was hell. When it was good, it was good. When it was bad, it was bad.”

In 1988, Abramović and Ulay positioned themselves at either end of the Great Wall of China, the ancient 13,000-mile-long Ming dynasty monument, and began walking. They’d originally planned to meet in the middle and get married. Instead, the artists met in the middle and broke up.

Titled The Lovers: The Great Wall Walk, this performance marked a “turning point in Abramović’s career,” writes Tatler. During her 90-day journey, Abramović visited villages and learned about traditional Chinese medicine, which inspired artworks now on display in Shanghai. For example, the new show displays a piece called Reprogramming Levitation, which asks visitors to apply healing herbs in copper bathtubs. They’ll also get to read poetry that Abramović wrote during her trek.

“The public didn’t get to experience the Great Wall work,” she tells Tatler. “I wanted to transfer my experience to [them].”

The photos of the walk will be divided into four categories: “the preparation and beginning walk, encounters with locals, walking the wall and meeting Ulay, and staged experiments and landscapes,” as curator Shai Baitel tells CNN’s Stephy Chung.

Baitel adds that he was “blown away” by the images, which have been sitting in storage. “It is a treasure for a curator, for anyone that is in the business of art, or art history research, [to] document [what has] not been digitized yet but exists there in large quantities.”

“Transforming Energy” is on view at the Modern Art Museum Shanghai through February 28, 2025.

Sonja Anderson | READ MORE

Sonja Anderson is a writer and reporter based in New York City.