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The event is in collaboration with Open Care – Servizi per l'Arte, Academic Master in Contemporary Art Markets - Visual Arts Department, NABA Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti Milano, Italy-China Institute, Milan.

THE SIGG COLLECTION. A STORY OF CHINESE CONTEMPORARY ART

Conversation with Uli Sigg

“Every collection is a process materialized. It is a distillate of the collector’s vision, imagination, intuition and passion, of research efforts, of the opportunities seized, of the resources made available, of hard work, and of the lack thereof.”

Uli Sigg

The event dedicated to the Swiss collector Uli Sigg is the third appointment of the Public Program ideated by FM Centre for Contemporary Art, on the occasion of the exhibition The Szechwan Tale. China, Theatre and History. After focusing on the evolution of Chinese contemporary art from an art historical point of view (with Lü Peng, art historian and artistic director of the Anren Biennal, and with the artist Liu Ding) and after analyzing institutions and the market for contemporary art in China from the perspective of academic research and Italian art market professionals active in the region (with Marilena Vecco, Burgundy School of Business, Dijon; Flavio del Monte, galleria Massimo De Carlo, Milano/Londra/Hong Kong and Beatrice Botta, Sotheby’s, Milano), FM is honored to host Swiss collector Uli Sigg to look closely into the phenomenon of collecting contemporary Chinese art and into its relationship with Chinese art institutions and museums.

Uli Sigg, entrepreneur active in China since the 70s, served from 1995 to 1995 as Swiss ambassador in Beijing and is currently known as the leading collector of contemporary Chinese art. The Sigg Collection, started in the 90s through a direct relationship with the artists, is renown for its museum quality and its encyclopedic structure. From the beginning it has been articulated in a systematic way as Uli Sigg envisioned it as intended to a Chinese museum of contemporary art.

“I started my collection as if I were an institution, forgetting about my personal taste and knowing that one day I would have given it back to its own country”, said Uli Sigg. Presented in different international exhibitions, today the collection includes 2.300 artworks by more than 350 Chinese artists, and constitutes a fundamental evidence of the development of Chinese art from the 70s to the beginning of the XXI century. Uli Sigg’s original project was fulfilled in 2012, when a large selection of 1.500 artworks was donated to M+, the nascent museum of contemporary art in Hong Kong, situated in the cultural district of West Kowloon and designed by Herzog & de Meuron, which will be opened in 2019.