Setting his foot 1979 in China, right into the second year of the country’s epochal era of reform and opening-up, Uli Sigg, the avid collector who is bathed in the category of Western post-war avant-garde art, now embarked his new business voyage, of which soon morphed into an odyssey of art exploration. Sigg immersed himself in the forefront of China’s contemporary art scene from the early 1990s. This was a period when the perspectives of art institutions where still taking shape, and the artist network was yet to be established. It was also an era of exploring works whose value was not yet firmly grounded, capturing the essence of a burgeoning artistic landscape.
Benefiting from Sigg’s distinctive taste projecting from an institutional perspective, his collection of Chinese contemporary art encompasses a wide array of styles and mediums from representative artists. This includes painting, printmaking, sculptures, installations, performance, photography, digital arts, and more, all of which were meticulously archived and curated into a collection prepared for institutional research and acquisition. In 2012, Sigg donated 1,463 pieces from his collection to the M+, with the vast majority of these works remaining in Hong Kong.
As a Western collector who began systematically collecting Chinese contemporary art in its nascent stages and witnessed its vibrant landscape unfold, why did Sigg choose to persist in adopting his collection approach from such an institutional perspective? Through this lens, what are the pivotal moments of contemporary Chinese art? Why does he believe that the canon of contemporary art remains unwritten? Delve deeper into Sigg’s insights on art collecting through LARRY’S LIST’s exclusive interview with this influential Swiss collector.
urveying the Evolution of Contemporary Chinese Art
Starting his venture in the early 1990s and climaxing with the donation to M+ in 2012, this Swiss collector’s devotion to Chinese art spans over three decades. Uli Sigg’s art collection traverses multiple pivotal phases in the realm of Chinese contemporary art which could hardly be reduced to the mere chronicles: the earliest pieces can be dated back to Cultural Revolution. Then, morphing into the 1970s to the mid-1980s, “The Stars Art Group” and “No Name Group” (mid 1970s) represent a period where Chinese artists’ subjects transformed from the socialist realism narrative to epistemological quest into the new status quo, upholstered by individual creativity explosion. Into the 1990s, the period is epitomized by movements like ’85 New Wave, “Post-Sense Sensibility” etc. Ultimately, from the turn of the millennium to the present, the Sigg Collection, once more, testifies to the phenomenal shift which presents the younger Chinese artists as more prominent players on the world stage.