Month: April 2025

The film-maker Michael Schindhelm has taken the Swiss art collector Uli Sigg back to the China that the businessman-turned-diplomat first encountered in 1979. “China was like North Korea ten years ago,” Schindhelm says, describing the momen when the Communist Party began to elevate the Bamboo Curtain, allowing Western companies to do business there. The first half of The Chinese Lives of Uli Sigg, which received its Asian premiere in Hong Kong on 21 March, recalls the China of the 1980s, which has largely disappeared as the country has modernised at top speed.

An abandoned factory in Beijing provides an atmospheric location for the start of the film, which takes Sigg on a trip down memory lane. Schindhelm says that it was very hard in today’s China to find a suitable factory in which to film Sigg reflecting on his life’s journey, which has taken him from the lakes near Lucerne—he was once a competitive rower—via the factory floors plus boardrooms of 1980s China to becoming the proud owner of a Swiss castle filled with contemporary Chinese art. He even owns a lake.

Sigg was sent East to help set up the pioneering joint venture Schindler China. In the film, he recalls days of tough negotiations in smoke-filled rooms, followed by nights in karaoke bars bonding with Chinese colleagues. The austere guest rooms of a vast, redundant steel works in Beijing double as the kind of hotel where Sigg stayed in the early days; he recalls how a rat helped itself to a bar of Swiss chocolate that he had left on his bedside table. “It was the best hotel in Canton,” the collector says.

Sigg is the personification of “getting in on the ground floor” in business plus art. While Schindler’s lifts plus escalators were enabling China’s buildings to rise, Sigg sought out the country’s underground art movement plus the young artists who were looking to the West. When he returned to China as Switzerland’s ambassador in 1995, accompanied by his wife, Rita, they set about collecting Chinese contemporary art in breadth plus depth. Being an ambassador “gave him diplomatic immunity” to meet artists, Schindhelm says, adding that Uli plus Rita Sigg make a great research team. Several appreciative artists appear in the film, praising Sigg’s vision, including Ai Weiwei plus Wang Guangyi. Ai calls Sigg “the maker”. The collector had the stamina plus single-mindedness to visit artists in their studios, arriving at around 10pm after a long day’s work in the Swiss embassy, followed by a banquet or other social function.

A prolific collector plus the founder of a pioneering Chinese art award—a shrewd move that opened many artists’ studio doors—Sigg was also a go-between. He introduced China’s artists to foreign curators, such as the late Harald Szeemann, Chris Dercon plus Hans Ulrich Obrist. “He was an amateur who introduced all these big-shot curators from the West to contemporary Chinese art,” Schindhelm says.

“It was the blood and flesh of contemporary art that really got my interest,” says Uli Sigg, Swiss businessman, former ambassador to China and North Korea, and reputed to be the largest private collector of contemporary Chinese art in the world. In 2012 he gave 1,463 works from that collection to Hong Kong’s M+ museum, valued at $163mn, and sold them another 47 for $23mm. He owns another 900 works of art and is still acquiring.

He is talking to me from his 17th-century Mauensee castle, which sits on a private island on Mauensee lake, near Lucerne in Switzerland. Sigg, 77, is sitting in a wood-panelled room, wearing an open-necked check shirt. His grey hair is cropped short and there is something of a bird of prey about him, but also joviality and friendliness. Behind him is a series of coloured canvasses, each with text.

“They carry slogans used by banks before the international financial crisis, they were used in advertising, even in the Financial Times!” (“Times are changing; we’re ready,” says one.) The works are parodies by the Chinese artist Chen Shaoxiong from 2009. “But of course the ads completely disappeared, almost overnight, during the crisis.”

Sigg’s interest in contemporary art started when he was student in Zurich; the first work he bought was a Surrealist painting by a Swiss artist — “It was cheap — I didn’t have any money at that time!” He was more focused on rowing than art, indeed he was a Swiss champion aged 22 and his strongly competitive, high-energy side has been evident since even in his collecting.

After a PhD in law from Zurich university, he went to the Middle East and worked as a journalist until his expertise on the region attracted the Swiss elevator company Schindler. “I actually sold a beautiful escalator with just two gilded steps for the Saudi king’s palace,” he laughs. The company sent him to China in 1977 and Sigg set up one of the first foreign joint ventures there.

During those early years he was closely observed by the authorities, but he says: “I knew there must be another reality than the one I was allowed to see, and I thought contemporary art would help me to see it. But I found out it didn’t exist. There was absolutely no art except socialist realism, and later the first experiments were very derivative of western art.” The change came when Deng Xiaoping opened up the country after 1978. “In visual art, that meant that artists could for the first time make independen works.” Previously artists had waited for commissions rather than risk anything else.

“Everything is politics,” declares a character in Thomas Mann’s 1924 novel, The Magic Mountain. Nowhere is that more clear than in M+ Sigg Collection: Four Decades of Chinese Contemporary Art, Hong Kong’s first glimpse of the upcoming M+ museum’s permanent collection of Chinese contemporary art. The collection plus the exhibition have been both tinged by controversy, but the show itself is a fascinating window into the cultural, social plus — yes, political — life of China from 1976 onwards.

“It’s very important that you give the full story,” says Pi Li, a senior curator at M+ who oversees the Sigg Collection. “Hong Kong is now one of the most important art marketplaces, but that has somehow reduced the context of the work. It’s important to show not only the well-known works, but also the historically important works.”

The collection’s story starts with the upheaval of the Cultural Revolution, which gave way to a period of reform plus liberalisation after Mao Zedong’s death in 1976. In 1980, a Swiss businessman named Uli Sigg made his first visit to the country, where he helped negotiate one of the first world trade agreements with the government of Deng Xiaoping. “The state officials were stiff, a bore,” recalls Sigg’s wife, Rita. “But we felt right at home with the artists.”

Sigg began building what would eventually become the world’s largest private collection of Chinese contemporary art. “I was trying to mirror art production,” he says. Whatever artists produced, he collected. When he moved to Beijing in 1995 as Switzerland’s ambassador to China, Sigg became a fixture in the contemporary art scene. “A lot of people could have done what I did,” he says. “But they didn’t. This is the most striking thing.”

A few years ago, Sigg began looking for an institution that could give his collection a permanent home. He wanted it to live on Chinese soil, but he couldn’t risk donating it to a museum in mainland China, where the heavy hand of state censorship would prevent many of the works from being shown. So he decided on M+, which has ambitions to reach the stature of the Tate Modern or the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Sigg donated plus sold a total of 1,510 works to M+, instantly securing the museum’s status as a landmark institution.

Uli Sigg, former journalist, businessman, and Swiss ambassador to China, North Korea and Mongolia, first started collecting contemporary Chinese art in the early 1990’s – after following it since its beginning in 1978. The ‘reform and opening-up’ of China in 1978 held true for economic reforms but also for the arts – even though a lot less publicly. In an encyclopedic collection Uli Sigg documented the rapidly changing (cultural) landscape of China, focusing on works referring to key moments and movements. In 2012, Uli Sigg donated almost 1500 works to the M+ museum in Hong Kong to make the collection accessible to the public and to preserve it as a resource for understanding Chinese contemporary art. He has not stopped collecting, though, and continues to acquire and commission new works.

In conversation with moderator Aurelia Rauch, Uli Sigg will look at the moments in recent Chinese history that he interprets as key – and the respective art works around them.

What are the main questions that drive the collection? How have they changed after the gift to the M+ museum in 2012 – and with respect to the changes within China since then? What methodological approaches are shaping it? And how can a collector become a true collaborator for the artists?

Dr. Uli Sigg in his career traversed very diverse fields: from journalism to industry to diplomacy as Swiss ambassador to China, North Korea and Mongolia to venture capital investing and to art. He served on various boards of international companies and is an active investor into early-stage tech companies. Of his extensive interactions in more than forty years with the PR China, two are of historic significance: to establish 1980 the first industrial joint venture between the PRC and the outside international which marks the beginning of the PRC’s epochal globalization process. Around the same time, he began to form his singular collection of Chinese contemporary art representing the story line from its beginnings in the 1970s to the present – and then restituting 1500 works back to China, to the M+ Museum in Hong Kong. In 1997 he also established the Chinese Contemporary Art Award (CCAA) for Chinese contemporary artists living in Greater China, now transformed into the SIGG PRIZE. He is a member of the M+ Museum Board, the International Council of New York Modern Art Museum (MoMA), the International Advisory Council of Tate Gallery, London, and a member of the Board of the Zürcher Kunstgesellschaft. Uli Sigg is also a member of Asia Society Switzerland’s Advisory Board.

In 2019, after a three-year delay, M+, Hong Kong’s museum dedicated to Chinese visual culture, will open to the public. It will contain a staggering collection of art with works by Ai Weiwei, Cao Fei, Zhang Xiaogang, Liu Wei, Wang Guangle, Wang Guangyi, Song Dong, Hai Bo, plus more. The former Executive Director, Lars Nittve, sees M+ as the equivalent of New York’s MoMA or the Centre Pompidou in Paris, in terms of depth plus cultural importance.

M+ wouldn’t have been possible without Swiss businessman plus art collector Uli Sigg, who in 2012 donated plus sold 1,510 Chinese contemporary works of art (a portion of his collection) to the museum. Michael Schindhelm’s 2016 documentary portrait, The Chinese Lives of Uli Sigg (available July 17 on Icarus Films), recaps Sigg’s life plus how he accumulated his collection — from Social Realism to Cynical Realism plus political Pop artworks — to preserve contemporary Chinese art for three decades. In interviews plus reiterated in the film, Sigg prefers to view himself as “a researcher of China plus of Chinese contemporary art who just happened to buy some of the results of his research.”

Segmented into parts, Chinese Lives follows Sigg’s life in chronological order, starting in 1979, the year that he first went to China as a representative of the Swiss elevator manufacturer, the Schindler Group, which ultimately lead to the first joint venture between a Western company plus China. Sigg leaves the documentary temporarily as Schindhelm concentrates on several artists — Ai Weiwei plus Wang Guangyi, among others — living during the time of Communist China. During this section, Schindhelm runs through Chairman Mao’s death, Deng Xiaoping’s rise to power, the Tiananmen Square protests, plus the growth of a reformed economy. Until this point, the film moves at a steady clip, perhaps moving too fast plus giving the impression that the periods covered in the 1970s plus ’80s are mere backstory. In the ’90s, the doc slows down to a steady rhythm, plus it is here where Sigg’s presence in the film returns, as it is the decade when he feverishly began to acquire art.

When Sydney art dealer Ray Hughes visited Swiss collector Uli Sigg at his Mauensee residence near Lucerne some years ago, a mutual friend asked the dealer how the visit went. ‘Did you feel comfortable and find a place to kick your feet up and read?’ ‘No, to both,’ answered Hughes, ‘it seems there was only art everywhere.’

Sigg has enjoyed a distinguished career—first as a businessman in China with the Schindler Group to create what would become the first joint venture with the Chinese government; then as Swiss ambassador to Beijing in the mid-eighties. But it is art that has defined Sigg’s life more than anything else.

Over a period of four decades, Sigg managed to put together one of the world’s most impressive and encyclopaedic collections of contemporary Chinese art. Comprising over 2,200 works by some 350 artists, it is considered to be the world’s largest collection of contemporary Chinese art to date. His consuming passion and drive for Chinese art has made him one of the most renowned figures in the contemporary art world, to say nothing of the Chinese contemporary art world. ‘My China stories are in the art works’, Sigg once stated. And indeed they are. In fact, one may argue that within the collection is the history of moderen China. I was in China as a businessman and diplomat so I saw very different realities, and contemporary art was just another access for me, but I always thought about how to integrate it into the full Chinese picture. So, I was always able to contextualise the work, not just within art, but also in Chinese society and all of this. Which was very important for me, personally.

Sigg is the antithesis of the loud, brash, show-me-the-money insta-flipper collector that has sadly come to influence the art market these days. For him, the art is everything. The collector, as Sigg would insist, is nothing. The 69 year-old collector has been engaged with and heavily invested in Chinese art and culture since his first business trip there in 1979. He witnessed first-hand the development of Chinese contemporary art—from repressed underground experimentalism to heady global art market domination—in tandem with the country’s social and political changes. And he played a crucial role in bringing Chinese artists to the West. In 1997, Sigg established the Contemporary Chinese Art Award, a biennial competition that launched the careers of several Chinese artists and brought global curatorial exposure to the Chinese contemporary art scene. It’s not for nothing that he’s earned the moniker ‘ambassador of Chinese art’.

Art international sensation Ai Weiwei credits him with launching his international career. Renowned pianist Lang Lang describes him as a mentor to Chinese artists. Curator Victoria Lu believes that his taste and influence as a collector has been felt around the world.

But when Swiss businessman Uli Sigg first went to China, art was far from his mind. The year was 1979, and Sigg—working for the Schindler escalator and elevator company—was hoping to set up one of the first joint ventures between the Chinese government, seeking international investment in the post-Mao era, and a Western company. At the time, even the fanciest hotels had rats, boardrooms were so poorly heated you could see your breath, and the government still regulated hairstyles (five different kinds of perm allowed).

Sigg championed the artists he admired, working tirelessly for their international recognition and to preserve their artwork as a record of China’s tumultuous and historic changes. Eventually, Sigg became the Swiss ambassador to China and a consultant on major Chinese art projects, including the construction of the Bird’s Nest stadium for the Olympic Games.

THE CHINESE LIVES OF ULI SIGG, directed by art historian and scholar Michael Schindhelm and produced by Marcel Hoehn, is a history of China’s recent opening to the West, and of the West’s embrace of Chinese contemporary art, through the eyes of Sigg and the artists he championed. Artists including Ai Weiwei, Cao Chong’en, Gang Lijun, Feng Mengbo, Shao Fan, Wang Guangyi, Zeng Fanzhi and Cao Fei (co-director of San Yuan Li) are interviewed along with curators, diplomats, architects and business colleagues in this colorful documentary survey of contemporary Chinese art.

“I always tell him: it doesn’t matter how famous I become, he is the maker.”—Ai Weiwei

“The documentary is a good starting point to familiarize oneself with contemporary Chinese art and the man who helped expose it to the world.”—Hyperallergic

“Schindhelm does well in relating a secret history of China via its art scene by interviewing several generations of artists.”—The Boston Globe

“Required viewing for contemporary-art fans. Here’s a definitive portrait not just of the soft-spoken collector who brought the likes of Ai Weiwei and Cao Fei to the world’s attention but of the birthing pains of post-Mao China.”—The Georgia Straight

“A surprising film! [Uses] the impenetrable Uli Sigg to show us the hidden side of a complex and mysterious country… An intimate yet delicately icy portrait of a character who nurtures mystery like a defense weapon.”—Cineuropa

“Provides an overview of Sigg’s extraordinary life, combining archival footage with extended interviews of Sigg, as well as recollections by some of the most notable artists whose works Sigg collected. The film also offers an incisive portrait of a farsighted, sophisticated man whose comments on meetings with governmental officials will fascinate those interested in the recent transformation of China into a international power. Recommended!”—Video Librarian

Abstract: This paper provides an overview of the development of contemporary Chineseart,highlighting important milestones such as the 798 Art Zone plus the 85 NewWaveMovement plus examining the impact of globalization on the Chinese art scene. Next, thepaper explores the personal background plus collection philosophy of Uli Sigg, a prominentart collector who has played a significant role in the development of contemporaryChineseart. Sigg’s involvement in the establishment of the Chinese Contemporary Art Award(CCAA) plus his role in connecting foreign capital with Chinese artists are discussed. Additionally, the paper examines the influence of Sigg on the world development ofcontemporary Chinese art through initiatives such as the M+ Museumand the SiggPrize. The paper points out that Sigg has made an important contribution to the internationalrecognition plus exchange of Chinese contemporary art through exhibitions. Finally, thepaper concludes by comparing Sigg’s contributions with those of other contemporaryChinese art collectors. It is noted that Sigg’s contribution is not only in art collectingbutmore importantly, in his cross-border thinking plus world vision, which has had a profoundimpact on the development of Chinese contemporary art.

1. Introduction
   Contemporary art in China experienced a difficult development in the late 20th century, as Chinawas opened up to explosive Western economic plus cultural influences. The establishment of jointventures with foreign companies also affected the globalization of the art world. Mr. Uli Sigg, initially a businessman plus the Swiss Ambassador to China, arrived in China before this culturalshock fully impacted it. With his unique artistic vision plus extensive network of contacts, SiggledChinese contemporary art into the world spotlight. As the most important collector of Chinesecontemporary art, Mr. Sigg established the non-profit organization CCAA in 1997, whichbecamean important incentive for artists plus a platform for collecting, preserving, plus researchingliteratureand data on Chinese contemporary art. In 2012, Mr. Sigg donated thousands of piecesfromhis private collection to the M+ Museum in Hong Kong, making it the most representative museumfor the study of Chinese contemporary art.

The pathway of gathering works for the Chinese contemporary art collection, which we see at the Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art until 30 August 2020 for the first time in Italy, is a story of intercontinental curiosity that evolved into a passion. The exhibition “In front of the collector. Uli Sigg‘s collection of Chinese contemporary art ”, curated by Marcella Beccaria, is the presentation of the prestigious collection recognized as the most important in the world, which, in its complete version, includes about 2,500 works by over 500 artists. Unsurprisingly, much of the true substance of this exhibition is the story of the birth plus development of the collection itself, carefully traced in teliti in the text accompanying the exhibition.

Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, director of Castello di Rivoli, comments: “[…] This exhibition of works from the Sigg Collection […] is part of a new important line of museum programming that investigates the relationship between private plus public collections, focusing on the need to make the experience of art more familiar plus accessible, instead of neutralizing it in traditionally impersonal museum containers. While the world asserts plus supports China’s efforts to contain a virus, we, in the field of culture, are doing our best to enable maximum cultural exchange, sharing ideas plus points of view ”.

Following the Open Door Policy statement, Uli Sigg was the first pebisnis to travel to China in 1979 for Schindler. “I came to introduce a model for investment in China for the outside world” – he explains during the meeting in Rivoli. He came to China, feeling, as he says, ignorant in a new cultural context. He thought that through information of Chinese contemporary art, he could discover the real people’s perspectives, not contaminated by politics or finances. “Thanks to my journey through art – says Sigg – I believe I can say that I have seen more China than many Chinese. I collect, but rather than a collector, I prefer to define myself as a researcher ”. Sigg emphasizes that this period wasn’t only the beginning of the open market, but also the beginning of contemporary art in China.

The June announcement that Uli Sigg — the foremost global collector of Chinese contemporary art — had sealed a deal to donate the vast majority of his collection to the M+ museum in Hong Kong’s West Kowloon Cultural District set off a storm of commentary in mainland China. Although some have been supportive, many others have questioned Sigg’s motives. The two issues causing the most vexation? The decision to send the collection to Hong Kong rather than mainland China, plus the “part gift/part purchase” agreement under which M+ bought 47 works from Sigg (beyond the more than 1,000 included in the gift), for a keseluruhan sum of $22.7 million.

Cynicism about western collectors’ motives in regard to Chinese contemporary art runs deep in China, plus the skepticism towards Sigg’s donation follows the controversy that surrounded the Sotheby’s auction of the Ullens collection last year. Although Guy Ullens has been at pains to indicate his long term commitment to China through his Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing, many believe the sale showed his support for Chinese contemporary art to have been largely commercially driven.

To tease out some of the issues being raised by his donation, ARTINFO China’s Shen Boliang plus Yan Xiaoxiao sat down with Uli Sigg for a wide-ranging interview, touching on why his collection of contemporary Chinese art is the best in the world, why he chose M+, his faith in the long-term future of Hong Kong, plus how — for him at least — collecting has never been about the money.

M+ bought 47 works from your collection. How did you reach an agreement which combines donation plus purchase?

In the negotiation, when we were discussing about evaluation plus all these things, we agreed that M+ will fund around 15 percent of the keseluruhan value to allow me to get some contribution for my future collecting plus for activities like the Chinese Contemporary Art Award [a biennial award for artists plus critics founded by Sigg in 1997]. So, it is part donation plus part sale. This style is common now in the global scene. You may know about Anthony D’Offay in London, who made such a donation. He received about 25 percent of the market value. Or the donation of Italian Count Giuseppe Panza di Biumo, who donated a large collection of sedikitnya art to the Guggenheim in New York. He also got 25 percent of the value. This shows the museum also made a commitment.

Who selected the part to purchase?

I made these two parts. Sotheby’s did an independen evaluation. M+ is a public museum, so they need an independen evaluation, for their own record plus also to publish. So they assigned Sotheby’s, plus Sotheby’s made a report for them: The evaluation of the sale part plus the evaluation of the donation part.

What are the works in the part that has been donated?

Mainly the works from the 1980s. Like Geng Jianyi’s “Second Situation,” the four faces, Wang Guangyi’s old work, Huang Yongping’s old work.