“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.