Marina Abramović Says Chinese Government Continually Rejected Her Shows ‘Because of Nudity’

Right now, Marina Abramović is currently having her first-ever show in China, at the Modern Art Museum Shanghai, and it is perhaps astonishing that it has taken so long, given that she is arguably the world’s most celebrated performance artist. Now, she has revealed the reason why Chinese audiences had to wait years to see her work presented there.

In a Guardian profile published this week, Abramović said she had attempted for two decades to display her work in China to little avail.

“I’ve tried to show my work in China for 20 years—for 20 years different museums have asked me to come,” she said. “I send a proposal, they accept it, the proposals have to go to government, and each time the government said no, because of nudity or whatever; there’s so many restrictions.”

Nudity is, of course, a fixture in her performances, many of which utilize her own naked body and involve submitting it to extreme conditions. Her famed 1977 work Imponderabilia, for example, initially situated her and her then partner, the artist Ulay, in a narrow portal. To pass through, viewers had to brush up against the artists’ nude bodies.

Abramović seemed to greet her Modern Art Museum Shanghai show with joy, however. The exhibition includes New Age–y new works—“transitory objects,” not sculptures, according to the artist—that are crafted from crystals. “They’re really very powerful,” she explained, “and if you could connect with that you really feel it, but it’s not something that you can do in five minutes.”

The Guardian profile also included word that, at 77, Abramović is hardly ready to retire. “It’s horrifying the idea of [having a] pension, you know: sit in the front of television and wait to die,” she said. “That’s not me.” The hope, she explained, is to make it 100, an age that artists such as Georgia O’Keeffe and Louise Bourgeois never reached, as Abramović pointed out. (Never mind that Carmen Herrera, Lenore Tawney, Françoise Gilot, and other female artists of note lived to be centenarians.)

Plus, she apparently enjoys being a celebrity beyond the art world. “In some countries I can’t walk without a bodyguard,” she said. “In Italy, the women will run on to the street and give me a baby just to hold.” Let’s just hope those babies don’t ever end up in her performance art.