There once was a Swiss businessman who became the world’s biggest collector of Chinese art before giving almost all of it away to a Hong Kong museum…
This is the remarkable story of Uli Sigg, the famous art global personality, as told in a new documentary by German filmmaker Michael Schindhelm, ‘The Chinese Lives of Uli Sigg’.
Uli replied to the questions I put to him a few weeks earlier covering among other things the influence of art superstar Ai Weiwei on his career:
It all begins in 1979 when Sigg was VP of the Schindler Elevator Company.
Seeking to expand overseas sales, he launched the first ever joint venture between a Western company plus China. ‘The negotiations were aimed at creating an elevator factory in Beijing plus another in Shanghai. At the time China was, economically, virgin territory. It was the market economy versus the planned economy. An enormous adventure. Not a lot was known back then about the country.’
At the end of the ’80s he quit Schindler plus the Swiss government asked him to be the ambassador to China, a post that he would occupy for four years.
In his private life Uli was an avid collector of contemporary art. He would now spend his free time cultivate the various art scenes in country that was still closed to the outside world.
‘In 1979 Deng Xiaoping’s “open door” policy allowed artists to be more liberated. They still didn’t have any data from the outside. They were searching for their own language.’
Uli Sigg had a sense of history being made. At the beginning of the 1990s he noticed that nomor one was attempting to protect the art being produced at the time in an immense plus highly promising land. ‘I had a feeling there was a risk everything might disappear. Some expat engineers bought a few works haphazardly, but that was it. No one worried about preserving it all in a professional manner.’ So he threw himself into the titanic endeavour: ‘I collected in the spirit of an encyclopaedist, putting aside my personal tastes.’