The Nightsea Crossing performance timeline framed a very significant period in the couple’s relationship. Around 1980 when they first began performing it, they decided to get married - and they wanted to celebrate their union in one of the grandest romantic gestures I’ve ever heard performed in the modern day: walking from opposite ends of the Great Wall of China towards each other, in order to meet in the middle before wedding. They reached out to the Chinese Governmental for permission to carry out their performance, and waited for years to hear back. In the meantime, the couple drifted further and further from each other due to infidelities and irreconcilable differences among other issues.
Around 1987, they were finally granted permission to scale the entirety of the wall. While they had already separated as a couple, they agreed to carry on with their plans, and each walk across half the wall to each other until meeting in the middle - when they would instead say their final goodbye.
They each embarked on their 3-month long trek from opposite ends of the ~13,170 mile wonder of the world, Abramović starting at the Yellow Sea and Ulay starting from the Gobi desert. They stayed at inns along the way and communicated with their personal Chinese translators.
Abramović has expressed in the past that part of her longed for a reconciliation between them when the performance had completed. But as the two of them met at the center of the wall, her longing for him as a romantic partner was in many ways replaced by strong feelings towards him as a comrade and fellow artist. It was an emotional finish for the both of them, as they knew it would be their last collaboration. However, this emotional time was made more complicated when Abramović was given the news that during the trek, Ulay had impregnated the Chinese translator who had accompanied him. Abramović has expressed that she was utterly heartbroken when she made the discovery.
The daughter born out of the relationship was not Ulay’s first child. He has admitted to impregnating two women in the late ‘60s/early ‘70s and cutting ties with them both, as well as the two sons who resulted from those unions. He handled his relationship with the translator much differently, moving her to Amsterdam right before her due date and the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989. He helped her deliver their child - a daughter he named Luna after seeing the moon hanging prominently over the clinic on the night she was born. The couple stayed together for many years, traveling the world with Luna until she reached 17, when Ulay said his goodbyes to both women.
While Abramović has been married twice - to Neša Paripović from 1971 to 1976 and to Italian contemporary artist Paolo Canevari from 2006 to 2009, she has never had any children. She has explained to media outlets that she has endured three abortions in her lifetime, feeling that having children would be “a disaster for [her] work.” She’s expressed that she believes that part of why women historically haven’t had the same opportunities and successes as men is because of commitments to their love lives and children.