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.