Moments from Great Wall of China

In March 1988, after eight years of negotiating with the Chinese government for permission, Marina Abramovic and her partner and collaborator Ulay each began walking from opposite ends of the Great Wall, she from the eastern end at the Bohai Sea, he from the Gobi Desert in the west, intending to meet in the middle and marry. By the time they finally met after roughly ninety days of walking, their relationship had quietly fallen apart during the years of delay, and instead of a wedding, The Lovers, as the piece came to be called, became a farewell: they met, embraced once, and separated for good. It remains one of the most quietly devastating works in performance art history, precisely because its meaning changed entirely, from proposal to breakup, without either artist changing a single planned step.

Nearly forty years later, Abramovic has returned to China with new exhibitions revisiting that walk, and the wall itself remains one of the few places in art history where geography, an actual physical journey across thousands of kilometers of mountains and desert, was itself the medium. If you walk any section of the wall with this story in mind, even a heavily touristed stretch near Beijing, it's worth remembering that the wall's real significance to at least one major artist had nothing to do with its scale as a monument and everything to do with how long it takes two people to walk toward, and eventually away from, each other.