A short but interesting conversation with Uli Sigg, hosted by the Asia Society. He worked for the Schindler Group from 1977 to 1990, during which he helped set up the company’s joint venture in China. He later served as Switzerland’s ambassador to China, North Korea and Mongolia. During his time in China, he built a substantial private collection of contemporary Chinese art, eventually donating ~1,500 of these works to HK’s M+ Museum for Visual Arts in 2012.

He talks about his collecting journey and why he eventually donated a large part of his collection (some notes from the interview are included below, but please keep in mind these are for personal reference only and any mistakes in transcription are my own).

On his origin story, why collect art?

Why do you eat? Why do you drink? It seems to be an elementary desire for some people. For some, it is the visual experience, for others it might be music etc. But what always fascinated him about Chinese art was to what degree it mirrored society and the transformation in China. He doesn’t think any country has ever gone through such a tremendous amount of change over such a compressed period of time, maybe 15-20 years. In some ways, perhaps only Chinese society could sustain such a dramatic change and he thinks that is all mirrored in the art. For him, art was just one way of accessing the Chinese reality, but he always saw himself more as a researcher of China through art, business, politics etc. You could read a hundred books but would never get that same type of impact as if you were to see a large collection of Chinese contemporary art.

On finding the artists, the early days of collecting:

In his early days in China, he could not go to see them himself because he would have put at risk the joint venture company, perhaps himself and ever more certainly the artists. He had to get the material from middlemen, they would show him works, which piqued his curiosity. That was his first review of what the artists were doing. Later on, by the late 1980s / early 1990s, he thought Chinese artists were really finding their own language and it started getting interesting for him, so he started to visit many of the artists. Initially he went looking for them, some were maybe introduced by friends but after some time the artists introduced him to other artists. To them, he was a very strange animal that was spending money on buying this art, which no one did, and being interested to talk with these artists. Most of them were not at all used to having a conversation about what they were doing and why they were doing it. They also took the opportunity to get advice from him about the market, what should they do, paint etc.

On evolving towards more of an encyclopedic approach to collecting Chinese art:

His plan started to change once he could go out himself and meet the artists. This often had to happen at night, maybe on a Sunday and he would have to drive his car himself. Some of the artists had their works under their bed at home, he would negotiate and take the works out at night so no one would know the artists had sold them or even that they had them. Chinese artists were then still in a semi-underground phase, if not underground. He would typically buy a couple of pieces for himself and while doing that he saw no one was really collecting in anything other than a very random way. He thought it was odd that no one really seemed to care what the contemporary artists were contributing to Chinese society. So he imposed that task on himself of what a national museum should do but did not do. That completely changed his focus. Before it was more about his personal taste, but it became more about mirroring the width and depth of Chinese art creation across all media and along the timeline. In some cases, he even had to go back and collect what he had refused to collect in the early days in order to recreate the story line from the very beginning. But that was still very easy because no one cared at that time about the early stages of Chinese contemporary art.

On his eventual donation of ~1,500 works from his personal collection to the M+ in HK:

By the time he decided to collect in this encyclopedic way like an institution would, he had already made the decision that he would give it to China, because it didn’t really make sense in his hands. Someone had to compile it so that there is one place in the world where you can go and see this story of Chinese contemporary art. There was no place like that in all of China, which would be like going to Paris and not being able to find an impressionist painting. So for him, it was clear the works must go to China but it was not clear in terms of the where, when and how. Around 2010, the major Chinese cities all had some big museum projects on the drawing board, so he thought this was the moment to find a place for his collection. He negotiated with Beijing, Shanghai, which would have been natural cities for him to place the collection, but he did not get very far because it was still very unchartered territory for official China at that time. Around the same time, HK approached him as they also had a huge museum on their drawing board. So he started a dialogue with the HK government and they argued very well that they didn’t have the censorship issues of the mainland, greater freedom of art, speech etc. In 2012, they could say all of that in good faith, so that is why the 1,500 pieces eventually went to M+.

Did he ever think about keeping the collection in the West?

It was a short thought. Somewhere like the Tate or MoMA would love to have taken the collection and they would have probably given him a fantastic exhibition. But then it would all disappear into storage. That would be normal, since it is not their core business. If you go to the MoMA, you want to see the Brillo Boxes, the Marilyns and the Jasper Johns Flag. You aren’t going there for a large permanent exhibition of Chinese contemporary art. So the only place where the collection would be the core business was in China. And the Chinese people should also be able to see their own art, which they really don’t know. Even many of the experts don’t know it yet. The canon of Chinese contemporary art is being written right now, you now have the distance to say these things are really important, these are less so than we thought at the time etc. And for that, you need to know his collection because there is a lot that no one has ever seen or come across because it couldn’t be shown or because he bought it directly from the artist. He had done about 25 exhibitions in the Western world but none of those books were allowed in China, which means many of the Chinese curators and critics don’t really know the collection.

On his personal approach to collecting:

Most people will collect to their own taste or what they think their taste is, which might also change substantially over time. That’s very understandable and normal. He would call that first phase more of an accumulation, not a collection. What makes it a collection is a focus, which is a very difficult decision in a collector’s life. Many people will never take this decision, which is also perfectly ok. But having a focus allows you to bring works together where the context speaks to each other and charge each other up. It is not just about having masterpieces, you also need works where the reputations may come and go (what today we consider a second-rate artist might become a master in 10-15 years). If you look at an auction catalogue from 15 years ago, half of the people you don’t even remember. As he said before, he sees himself more as a researcher of China, so he uses his collecting for his research. He also likes to commission works. For example, he might try to find an artist that tries to understand the issues he is interested in exploring and they will work on it together to create the work. As a result, he is also involved in the creative process, which to him is the most interesting way of collecting.