They walked the Great Wall of China to say goodbye.
Marina Abramović and Ulay had spent 12 years as lovers, partners, and collaborators — living out of a van, pushing their bodies to extremes, creating some of the most radical art of the 20th century. When their relationship collapsed, they chose an ending worthy of the life they had lived. In 1988, they walked from opposite ends of the Great Wall toward each other — thousands of kilometres each — and said farewell in the middle. What Abramović didn’t know was that Ulay’s translator was pregnant with his child.
She didn’t see him again for 22 years.
In 2010, she sat alone at a table in the Museum of Modern Art in New York — eight hours a day, every day, for three months — as part of a performance called “The Artist Is Present.” Strangers came and went, sitting silently across from her one by one. She never spoke. She never moved. She was simply there.
Then one day, she looked up, and it was him.
Ulay sat across the table. He shook his head slowly. Her eyes filled with tears. She reached across and took his hands. The crowd, watching in silence, broke into applause.
Then he stood up and walked away. Another stranger sat down. And she carried on.
The footage spread across the world — two people, two decades of silence, and a lifetime between them, distilled into a single wordless moment.
Ulay died in March 2020, aged 76.