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.