Pioneering performance artist Marina Abramovic famously once walked thousands of kilometres along the Great Wall of China, a conceptual piece that became the stuff of art world legend.
Now, decades later, she is finally holding her first exhibition in the country.
Abramovic, 77, will open her largest show ever at Shanghai’s Modern Art Museum on Thursday.
“I was always dreaming how I can have a show here,” Abramovic told AFP in Shanghai.
“To have a show here, you have to be invited — now I’m invited.”
She said the wait had given her the chance to create something “very different than any show ever made… absolutely fully interactive”.
“I think that China deserves something very, very radical and this is very radical.”
These days the country is a nascent superpower, but when Abramovic finished her 90-day feat of endurance along the Great Wall in 1988, it was only just emerging from years of isolation.
She and German artist Ulay, her romantic and creative partner for many years, had initially planned to get married after walking from opposite ends of the Wall to meet in the middle.
But it took so many years for Chinese officials to approve the project that their relationship had withered by the time they started the hike.
When the two artists reached the midpoint, they broke up instead.
– Detox –
The new exhibition, entitled “Transforming Energy”, features videos and photos from that project, as well as dozens of new pieces embedded with Brazilian crystals.
Visitors will be encouraged to walk under and lie down on the works, or cooperate with strangers to “complete” them through physical gestures.
“I really wish (for a) detox of technology in this show,” Abramovic told AFP, adding that visitors will be encouraged to put their phones away — a big ask in social media-obsessed Shanghai.
Born in the former Yugoslavia, Abramovic made her name with performances and pieces that blurred the boundary between the artist’s body and art, often requiring audience involvement.
In 1974, she performed “Rhythm Zero”, inviting visitors to treat her however they wanted with an array of objects including a rose and a gun.
Audience members eventually turned violent as they realised they could act with impunity.
More recently, at the Glastonbury Festival this year, Abramovic led an audience of hundreds in seven minutes of silence while wearing a white dress in the shape of a peace symbol.
Abramovic told AFP she felt people were drawn to her work because they “like to be part of something on the very human level”.
“I don’t lie，I tell the truth，I don’t pretend anything else, I show vulnerability and somehow it’s real,” she said.
“I experience incredibly much love, and also this brings me so much responsibility.”
– Chinese influence –
China has changed dramatically from her first trip, on which she had an entourage of soldiers dispatched by the Chinese government, as well as an interpreter.
“I never saw a car in 1988, it was all bicycles,” Abramovic said.
At each village along the Wall, she asked to speak with local elders and listened to their tales of mythical dragons.
Now, she sees robots delivering food to guests at her Shanghai hotel.
But the country still feels like “home”, she said, drawing parallels with her upbringing as the daughter of communist officials.
“I come from communism, I’m a hard worker, I have strong discipline and strong dedication,” she said.
Likewise, “Chinese people are hardworking people”.
Asked whether she thought it was ironic that a communist government was welcoming her now after being criticised for her earlier work in Yugoslavia, she said she does not talk about politics because her work is not political.
Her encounters along the Wall in 1988 sparked an interest in traditional healing practices, which fed into an enduring fascination with the alleged benefits of crystals.
In the show, trained guides will perform meditative actions with pieces intended to help participants channel the energy that Abramovic believes crystals contain.
“People should talk to each other, people should fall in love with each other — and this show is, in some kind of even romantic way, going back to simplicity,” she said.
“I don’t like it when you see the young people sitting at the table texting each other, we’ve lost simple human contact.”
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