Installation view of Ulay: An Unmeasurable Thing at Spike Gallery, 2022. The performance by Ulay that broke out of the art world into common cultural memory was the one he made with Marina Abramovic, his companion and collaborator for twelve years: they walked toward each other from opposite ends of the Great Wall for ninety days and, at the end of the journey, ended their relationship with an embrace. Ulay was also a pioneer in pushing the instant image of the Polaroid camera to its furthest possibilities.

Again and again, he used the camera to explore the body, relations between the sexes, social questions, and issues of gender. “Taking Polaroids, for me, was performing in front of the lens,” he said. Because Ulay’s work is inseparable from his intimate connection to China, Spike Gallery, together with the Ulay Foundation, brought An Unmeasurable Thing, his first exhibition in Asia, to Beijing. On the occasion of the opening, we spoke remotely with the foundation’s director, Hana Ostan Ozbolt, and Ulay’s widow, Lena Pislak, who is also an administrator of the foundation, about the gentle, lovable Ulay they knew.

Portrait of Ulay, 2016. Photograph: Primoz Korosec for Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt. Installation view of Ulay: An Unmeasurable Thing at Spike Gallery, 2022. “Having an exhibition in China had actually always been one of Ulay’s wishes before he died,” Hana, the director of the Ulay Foundation, told us. In 1985, Ulay came to China for the first time. For a Western artist of that period, China was a country dense with history and full of stories.

Its rich and expansive land, its hardworking and warmhearted people, and its profound culture gave rise to an unending flow of inspiration. He fell in love with the place, and over the next three years kept returning to this ground.

“The exhibition shows Ulay’s unusually intimate relationship with China, and his admiration for the country, its people, its qualities, and its culture.

“These works were specially chosen by us. We kept asking ourselves: What would a Chinese audience want to see? What can Ulay’s work bring to a Chinese audience?” Hana told us that the exhibition even includes a section devoted specifically to works from the “China series.” Installation view of Ulay: An Unmeasurable Thing at Spike Gallery, 2022. In the gallery, a corner formed by two walls is answered by a rough wooden structure that creates a third “wall,” enclosing the space on three sides. Hung across the frame, vertically and horizontally, are numerous photographs Ulay took while walking the Great Wall, recording the landscape along the way and the people he met.

Lai Mengxin, a partner at Spike Gallery and one of the exhibition’s curators, told us that the design was deliberate.

“Ulay had a very deep relationship with China, and the part of his story that concerns his connection with China was what mattered most to us in this exhibition. When we present exhibitions of foreign artists, what matters most to us is their relation to us, to the present moment, and to this soil.” Ulay, China: Along the Great Wall, 1986-1989. Copyright the artist. “During the three months he traveled in China, Ulay stayed in a different village every day. You can imagine how deeply attached he became to the local places.

We created passageways in the exhibition that rise and dip, and we hoped that, through that contrast, viewers might experience something of being inside a journey. This group of Polaroids from along the Great Wall preserves the original appearance of several provinces Ulay passed through, and is also a very important historical record,” Mengxin said. We were struck to find that, in a personal diary rarely shown in past exhibitions, he wrote a great deal of poetry in a mixture of Chinese and English and made many doodles, something quite unusual for Ulay.

Ulay, The Great Wall Diary, 1986-1989/2016. Copyright the artist. In one poem, in Chinese neat enough to be called careful, he wrote: “Love is like air; wherever we are, we share it.” The diary also contains Chinese grain coupons and renminbi from the 1980s. Ulay preserved traces of his life in China in the form of a scrapbook. We can also see his original identity card and the travel document issued to him in China, where his Chinese name appears as “Wu Lai,” a name that feels far more meditative than “Ulay.”

“I can’t be sure whether Ulay himself chose those two Chinese characters. That may be something we will never know,” Hana said with feeling. Ulay, Door, 98, 1988-89/2016. Copyright the artist. Pictured is Ulay in 1988 with the original sculpture. Installation view of Ulay: An Unmeasurable Thing at Spike Gallery, 2022. The Door, 98 on view was remade by Ulay in 2016 from the damaged original sculpture of 1988-89. Inspired by the openings set into the Great Wall, it is a large aluminum sculpture shaped like a gate, one of the very few sculptures the artist made.

Ulay exhibited the original version in 1989 at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, together with another work, Pulse, a sculpture shaped like a dragon’s spine and meant to evoke the Great Wall winding across China. Installation view of Ulay: An Unmeasurable Thing at Spike Gallery, 2022. Ulay/Marina Abramovic, Lovers: The Great Wall Walk (still), 1988. Copyright the artist. Image courtesy Marina Abramovic Archives, Ulay Foundation, LIMA, and Spike Gallery. The “China series” also includes a two-channel video derived from Ulay and Marina Abramovic’s final artistic project together, the performance Lovers: The Great Wall Walk.

They agreed to walk toward each other from opposite ends of the Great Wall and meet in the middle. Ulay, as the male figure, stood for “fire.” He set out from Jiayuguan, at the edge of the Gobi and ringed by desert, and walked westward. Abramovic represented “water” and departed from Shanhaiguan, on the Bohai Sea, moving eastward. After ninety days, they met at Erlang Mountain in Shaanxi, at the center of the Wall. When they met, they laughed, embraced, and said goodbye. Ulay and Marina Abramovic walking on the Great Wall, 1988. Source: internet. Marina Abramovic and Ulay embracing and parting after meeting during the walk, 1988. Source: internet. Eight years earlier, while living in the Australian desert, they had first conceived the Great Wall walk, originally as a journey that would end in marriage.

But it took them eight years to secure approval for the performance, and by then their relationship had come apart.

“Before the walk began, their relationship was already on the verge of collapse. They were always having fierce arguments. But for the sake of the art, the two of them still decided to complete the project properly,” Hana told us. In the end, after meeting on the Great Wall, they chose to end the relationship and begin new lives apart. Installation view of Ulay: An Unmeasurable Thing at Spike Gallery, 2022. Ulay, Slogans in Random Order, 1974-75/2016. Copyright the artist. Ulay, White Mask, 1973-74. Copyright the artist. Installation view of Ulay: An Unmeasurable Thing at Spike Gallery, 2022. Ulay, She/He, 1973-74/2022. Copyright the artist. Rewind to 1975, when Ulay met Marina Abramovic at a performance of her Lips of Thomas.

Ulay was then still in the first phase of his career, performing before a Polaroid camera to explore bodily transformation, reality and emptiness, and socially constructed questions of gender; he had just completed She/He. When they met again, he went to the airport to pick Abramovic up with his face made up in the half-male, half-female manner of that work. Abramovic, no less unconventional, was captivated, and the two quickly fell in love.

“In the early 1970s, Ulay was deeply interested in transgender people and in others whose experiences resembled his own, people who, because of war in childhood, had been displaced or subjected to family violence. He captured them with his Polaroid camera. She/He came out of that period. In it, he captured himself, with an uncertain identity, at once lost, hesitant, and wanting to overturn the self,” the curator Mengxin said. The works Ulay made with Abramovic include, from top to bottom, Relation in Time, 1977, in which their hair was tied together for seventeen hours; AAA-AAA, 1978, in which they opened their mouths and sustained long sounds while moving ever closer, until they finally pressed their mouths together and screamed, the performance lasting fifteen minutes; and Breathing In/Breathing Out, 1978, in which they blocked their noses with cigarette filters, pressed their mouths together, and tried to breathe back and forth through a single exchange of air for as long as possible, until they collapsed unconscious, their lungs filled with carbon dioxide.

During the twelve years he spent with Abramovic, Ulay entered another phase of his work. Together they created many now-famous pioneering performances. Their exploration of the violent and antagonistic dynamics between men and women grew out of their own experience within the relationship, and the intensity of their love and hatred made them an unquestioned star couple of the art world. Another section of the exhibition presents several emblematic works made by Ulay and Abramovic as a legendary artistic pair. The years 1976-1988 were also the twelve years in which Ulay’s career was most publicly visible.

Installation view of Ulay: An Unmeasurable Thing at Spike Gallery, 2022. Ulay/Marina Abramovic, Rest Energy, 1980. Copyright the artist. Animated image source: Louisiana Museum documentary. Rest Energy, which came close to costing them their lives, caused a sensation when the two performed it in Dublin in 1980. Many were stunned by what seemed like a disregard for survival. Though the performance lasted only four minutes, it still sets a viewer’s pulse racing.

They looked into each other’s eyes. Abramovic held the bow; Ulay drew the arrow, its point aimed directly at her heart. Had he released the string, she might well have died. Small microphones were placed near their hearts, recording their heavy breathing and the mounting thud of their heartbeats. Abramovic later said that the performance was the ultimate expression of trust, but also one of the most difficult works they ever undertook.

“The challenge was not only the physical tension created by having the two of them standing in opposition; it was mentally extreme as well. Abramovic said fear made the work, and it was full of their reflections at the time on human nature and intimate relationships,” Hana told us. Old photograph of Ulay and Marina Abramovic. Ulay/Marina Abramovic, Wednesday-Saturday (Cloud Patterns of Palm Leaves and Shadows in the Night Sky), 1987. Copyright the artist. Image courtesy Marina Abramovic Archives, Ulay Foundation, LIMA, and Spike Gallery. Wednesday-Saturday is one of the rarer collaborations between them that appears filled with calm and a Zen-like stillness.

Mottled palm shadows and darkness under the night sky: here they turned their attention toward more inward states of consciousness, spiritual energy, transcendent meditation, and nonverbal exchange. Ulay, Couple, 1989. Copyright the artist. In the year after his breakup with Abramovic, Ulay married Ding Xiaosong, the interpreter he had met during the Great Wall walk in China. Couple restages that walk in front of a Polaroid camera.

Ulay asked his then wife, Ding Xiaosong, to manipulate paper figures standing for Ulay and Abramovic, and, in the exaggerated expressions and gestures of Chinese puppet theater, to recount the artists’ state at the time and the story of the walk. In the final scene, Ding sets the paper figures on fire, suggesting that Ulay’s relationship with Abramovic burned as fiercely as flame, but was finally consumed, leaving only ashes.

“Their relationship and connection were so intense that, for a period after the breakup, both of them disappeared from view for a while. They needed time to figure out how to begin making work alone again,” Hana told us. Ulay, Self-Portrait, Whisper Series, 1993. Copyright the artist. Ulay, Nothingness (Skull, Grain and Vase 2), Whisper Series, 1993. Copyright the artist. Ulay once said in an interview that he was not a linear, coherent, highly efficient artist.

He was a person who moved by leaps.

“Every time I do something new, I choose different motives, different techniques, different dimensions, and so on. Once a work is finished, I let it go.” Installation view of Ulay: An Unmeasurable Thing at Spike Gallery, 2022. Ulay, Amaryllis, 1997-2018. Copyright the artist. For that reason, Ulay’s work in the 1990s took on an entirely new appearance. The large-format Polaroid photographs in the exhibition from the Whisper series have never before been shown. His reflections on nihilist literature appear in these dim, somber works: performative self-portraits; a vase as a sign of nothingness and reality; a skull as a sign of death; and water and seeds as signs of life.

Amaryllis makes especially clear what he was seeking. In 2010, it had been exactly twelve years since Ulay and Abramovic parted. During those twelve years, they quarreled repeatedly over the copyright to their collaborative works. That same year, at MoMA in New York, Abramovic sat for 716 hours in The Artist Is Present, silently meeting the gaze of each stranger who sat across from her, her eyes steady and still while some of those opposite her broke into tears.

Ulay came to Abramovic’s performance of The Artist Is Present. Source: Louisiana Museum documentary. But then Ulay appeared, and in that instant time seemed to stop. The moment Abramovic opened her eyes, the self-possession and composure she had long maintained fell away. First came surprise, then a smile edged with tears. She reached out both hands toward Ulay; he took them, and the two smiled at one another.

Photograph of Ulay and his wife Lena at The Artist Is Present. What the onlookers did not know was that Ulay had come accompanied by his wife, Lena, who would later become his widow. It was, in a sense, through her efforts alone that the hard frost between Ulay and Abramovic began to thaw. Lena told us, “Ulay said that if it hadn’t been for me, he simply wouldn’t have come.”

“When I first knew Ulay, he was very unused to being cared for, because for a long time before that he had lived alone. He loved our being together. He felt that, for the first time in his life, he had a home. I think he had spent his whole life waiting for, or hoping for, that kind of warmth. We had dogs, and in Louisiana, near Copenhagen in Denmark, many of his friends were there. He loved it there so much.” In photographs of life with Ulay provided by Lena, his widow, she looks into the camera and tells us their story in a tender voice and with a soft gaze, still glinting with longing for him.

Her warm voice seems almost to have a healing power. It is easy to imagine the solace and comfort she gave Ulay after his cancer diagnosis and in the final stage of his life. Still from Ulay’s documentary Project Cancer. Lena also helped him with a great deal of work, including the documentary Project Cancer, about his illness and his artistic life. At the time, they had not anticipated that Ulay’s condition would become so serious, so the film followed his chemotherapy as it happened.

“In a way, making the film during chemotherapy really helped him a great deal. He said that making a film was like therapy.” Ulay’s final work, Impossible Self-Portrait, 2016. Image provided by Lena, Ulay’s widow. Lena said that, during the filming, he wanted to say goodbye to all his friends and collaborators, and seeing old friends gave him immense satisfaction.

“We also did a project related to his early explorations of the body in photography, and I took part in it too, even though I’m very shy and never wanted to expose myself in photographs.” Lena said that Ulay was deeply focused when he worked, and that he prepared carefully every time, writing and taking extensive notes.

“But at home, he really loved to cook, and because he was German, he kept everything arranged in order,” Lena recalled with a laugh.

“I think that was a very good balance for him between work and life.” Ulay, second from left, with Lena, at left, and Abramovic, fourth from left. When we asked how Ulay and Abramovic reconciled, Lena said she “absolutely loves” the story. In 2015, Ulay won his lawsuit with Abramovic over copyright in their works. In court, he wanted to go over and greet her, but she turned her head away and ignored him.

Two months later, she and Ulay went to a small ashram in India, part of a therapy intended to help keep him in good condition during cancer treatment. On the morning of the third day, Lena got up early for a group yoga session and saw Abramovic sitting right in front of her.

“I thought, what is she doing here? Later, we began talking, and Marina said, ‘Lena, when I love, it is 100 percent, and when I hate, it is also 100 percent.’ I said to Marina that this time it could be different, that we could do it without being so absolute.” Lena’s conversation with Abramovic became the key to breaking the ice, and Ulay and Abramovic were eventually reconciled. Photograph of Ulay and Abramovic after their reconciliation, 2015. Image provided by Lena, Ulay’s widow. “At first Ulay was very doubtful, but by the end of the conversation, we had all become friends.

For Ulay, in his final years, it brought peace. He found mutual respect again between himself and Marina. And I gained a friend. We were still seeing her at her home last summer,” Lena said with a smile. In the Louisiana Museum documentary, Ulay and Abramovic appear together; below is a photograph of the two taken by a staff member with a Polaroid camera. It was also because of this conversation that Ulay and Abramovic later worked with the Louisiana Museum on a documentary about the two of them.

“I think it’s one of my favorite films, because you can see people recovering respect, love, and friendship. Everything is beautiful,” Lena said. Portrait of Ulay in his later years. Source: internet. Still from Ulay’s documentary Project Cancer. As a pioneering artist, Ulay held a strong fascination for many young people. So even while suffering from cancer, he devoted much of his final years to projects that encouraged younger artists.

“In his last years he was fragile, but he still had a full sense of humor. Even when Hana came to our house and he was lying in bed, he was still worrying about documents and materials connected with having an exhibition in China.” At this point, Lena’s voice caught. By the end of his life, Ulay understood his illness clearly, yet remained optimistic and full of love for life and for art.

“He lived in the present,” Lena said.