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’.