﻿From the moment in 1976 that Serbian and German performance artists Marina Abramović and Ulay (Frank Uwe Laysiepen, who died last month aged 76) clapped eyes on each other they were inseparable. Ulay found Abramović witchy and otherworldly; she found him wild and exciting. Even their initial encounter was propitious: they met in Amsterdam on their shared birthday of 30 November.

The pair began to perform together, describing themselves as a “two-headed body”. For years they lived a nomadic lifestyle, travelling across Europe in a corrugated iron van and performing in villages and towns. Their artistic collaborations matched their personalities: they focused on performances that put them in precarious and physically demanding situations, to see how they and their audience would respond. In one, called Relation in Time, they remained tied together by their hair for 17 hours. They explored conflict, taking their ideas to extremes: running full pelt into each other, naked, and slapping each other’s faces until they could take no more.

One of their pieces, Rest Energy, performed in Dublin in 1980, saw them balance each other on opposite sides of a drawn bow and arrow, with the arrow pointed at Abramović’s heart; one slip from Ulay and he could have killed her. Uncomfortable viewing, this was relationship therapy played out as art – and, perhaps, vice versa.

Marina and Ulay perform Rest Energy in 1980. Photograph: Gryf/Alamy

In 1983, Abramović and Ulay announced their ultimate collaboration: The Lovers. They proposed to be the first people to walk the Great Wall of China. Setting off alone from opposite ends, they planned to meet in the middle, where they would marry. Exhilarated by the emotional and physical scale of The Lovers, the pair imagined themselves walking alone across great expanses of the Chinese landscape, camping under the stars and concluding the journey with the ultimate commitment. They saw The Lovers as an odyssey and a performance in which they alone would be both players and audience.

Eager to prepare, and ever-practical, Ulay laid in a year’s supply of dried tofu and seaweed, together with tents and camping stoves. What the pair were less prepared for, however, was Chinese bureaucracy. The Beijing authorities struggled to comprehend the pair’s motives for the journey. No one camped or walked the Great Wall as an “art project”. And who in their right minds would want to get married on it? Paper trails were endless. Permissions and visas were granted then denied. The pair were told that it would be too dangerous to do the walk alone and they would be required to have an accompanying crew. As phone calls, letters and documents were fired back and forth between China and the artists, years rolled by.

Aerial view of the Great Wall.

Photograph: Real444/Getty Images

In 1986, they went to China to visit parts of the Great Wall, to familiarise themselves with it and meet some of the villagers they would be staying with. Permission was finally granted for the walk to take place the following year. Then, inexplicably, the authorities postponed it again. A frustrated Ulay confessed: “I have been living with the wall in my thoughts for five years. Already I feel I have walked it 10 times. Already it is worn, it is polished.”

Finally, having also agreed to participate in a film of their “study” of The Great Wall for Chinese Central Television, they were granted permission.

Abramović and Ulay began their walks on 30 March 1988, from either end of the Great Wall, known to the Chinese as The Sleeping Dragon. Abramović, set off westwards from the dragon’s head at the Bohai Sea, an extension of the Yellow Sea between China and the Korean peninsula. Dressed in baggy red clothes, she was given the nickname Pa Ma Ta Je – big fat sister mother.

Much of her trek proved arduous. Abramović was walking through the mountainous regions of eastern China. On such difficult and inaccessible terrain, she had to watch every step. On her fourth day, after slipping on rocks as slippery as polished ice, Abramović and her guide found themselves hanging by their fingertips over an abyss. She found homes and stables built into sections of the winding wall, and other parts that had been dismantled by locals who, under Mao’s encouragement to “kill the dragon”, had removed the clay and stones to build with. Once, Abramović claimed to have walked through a kilometre of human bones. Her accommodation in villages and hostels each night was often a two-hour trek from the wall.

Marina Abramović found much of the walk arduous. Photograph: publicdelivery.org

At every village she stayed in, Abramović asked to meet its oldest resident and for them to share a local legend. Inevitably these were dragon stories, often related to the wall itself. While built more than a 1,000 years as a defence against invaders from the north and west, the serpentine spine of the Great Wall had been carefully mapped out by geomancers for its “dragon energy”. Abramović would occasionally find copper pots placed along the wall, as energy spots: acupuncture points to control the forces that rippled up and down the creature’s back.

Five thousand kilometres west of Abramović, Ulay had started his walk at the dragon’s tail in the Gobi Desert. Moustachioed and lean, with long hair and matching bright-blue drawstring trousers and cape, Ulay would have looked to a westerner every bit the bohemian traveller. Most of his journey would be spent trekking through China’s deserts. Rickshaws and donkeys were familiar sights, as were camels pulling ploughs. Ulay crossed the great Yellow River on a raft covered with sheepskins and, like Abramović, saw families living in caves within the wall itself. He managed to sleep under the stars some nights, while his bemused crew watched over him from their jeeps. Most of the time, however, Ulay also had to sleep in nearby villages. While the simplicity of the trek stirred Ulay’s soul, its fragmentation by bureaucracy and restrictions meant it was not the romantic sojourn the pair had dreamed of.

The Great Wall of China is a collective name for fortifications that started being built in the seventh century BC. Photograph: Zhaojiankang/Getty

To the Chinese who encountered the artists, they were of great curiosity. Having originally believed themselves to be the sole players and audience for their walk, they found everything they did was witnessed as if a performance. In towns and villages, silent crowds followed them wherever they went. In one settlement, villagers gathered to watch Abramović sleep. When she awoke, a different group were present, silently observing her.

More by happenstance than planning, Ulay and Abramović met at the centre of a stone bridge in Shenmu in Shaanxi province, among a series of temples built in the Ming dynasty. They had averaged 20km a day, walked 90 days and covered roughly 2,000km each. As they embraced affectionately, Ulay shared with Abramović his desire to continue the walk “forever”. Abramović was unequivocal in her desire to get home. Ulay made a comment about her shoes that seemed to annoy her; to his irritation she began to cry.

While musicians, the Chinese press and even a fireworks display had been laid on for the pair, there would be no wedding ceremony. After a press conference in Beijing, they returned separately to Amsterdam and didn’t speak or see one another for 22 years. What had gone wrong?

Ulay and Marina approach each other at the end of their trek. Photograph: publicdelivery.org

In the five years that Ulay and Abramović had been waiting for permission for the walk, their lives had changed irrevocably. Their work had became internationally renowned. Abramović was fed up with being the archetypal poor artist, so she welcomed the success, but Ulay had no interest in celebrity. An anarchist who enjoyed solitude, he rebelled against what he saw as a growing commercialisation of their work. In short, they had grown apart. Both had had affairs; communication and trust had broken down.

Ulay and Abramović were not, however, the kind of couple to be easily defeated. They decided to go ahead with the walk, not in order to marry but to spilt up. The Lovers transformed from wedding to divorce. “Why didn’t you just make a phone call and break up like normal people?” one friend allegedly quipped. Because that simply wasn’t their style.

Marina and Ulay finally meet on the wall. Photograph: publicdelivery.org

To the Chinese, the dragon is an auspicious symbol, representing strength, good fortune and the elemental forces of nature. Walking the dragon’s spine had, for Ulay and Abramović, been intended as a great motif for transcending the barriers that divide us – it was to be a totem of love and reconnection. Instead, the wall came to represent a division in myriad forms, not just physical but also the political barriers they then perceived between east and west, as well as the emotional barriers that had grown between the pair. Since planning to walk the wall, their differences had become more apparent and more difficult to reconcile. Abramović embraced the growing success of their work; Ulay withdrew from it.

Unlike in China, the dragon in western mythology is perceived as a symbol of malevolence, a destructive creature to be hunted down and destroyed. Abramović claimed that the idea for The Lovers came to her in a dream, a vision in which the pair would wake a sleeping dragon through their epic walk. They had, it seemed, woken the wrong dragon.

Over the next two decades, Abramović’s work continued to reach larger and larger audiences; her celebrity grew. Her work inspired Lady Gaga and Jay-Z, she made adverts for Adidas and she came to be known as “the grandmother of performance art”.

Ulay and Marina sit opposite each other in 2010’s The Artist is Present. Photograph: Patrick McMullan/Getty Images

In 2010, at a New York Museum of Modern Art retrospective of her work entitled The Artist Is Present, Abramović sat for eight hours a day – 750 hours in total – in silence, at a table. Members of the public were invited to come, sit and hold her gaze. They were kept two metres apart at opposite ends of a table. Contact was not permitted. The show was spiritual and cathartic for some, pretentious and self-indulgent to others. Many queued for hours for the opportunity to sit opposite Abramović for a few minutes or, in a few cases – and to the irritation of those in the queue – the whole day.

One moment, however, was to capture the world’s attention and amass close to 20 million views on YouTube. On the opening night of the show, Ulay made a surprise appearance, steppping from the audience to sit and face his former lover. He nervously stretches his legs, adjusts his jacket and, as Abramović opens her eyes to see him, the pair smile. It is the first time in 22 years that they have seen each other. Tears fill their eyes.

Finally Abramović, in a flowing blood-red dress, leans across the two-metre division and – breaking her own rule of non-contact – takes Ulay’s hands. Onlookers begin to applaud. It is impossible to watch this moment without also being moved to tears. After their arduous journey and a long time apart, they are finally reunited. A new dragon is awakened. Intimacy is rekindled.

While their separation was a choice, ours – for now – remains a necessity. In time, physical intimacy will return to us all. And with it, perhaps, the opportunity for us all to awaken a new dragon.