There’s no doubt about Swiss art collector Uli Sigg’s enthusiasm for contemporary Chinese art—he’s the world’s largest collector. But he still has a soft spot for Switzerland’s artists and museums.
Few figures have shaped the international perception of Chinese contemporary art quite as much as Uli Sigg, whose Chinese art collection, at its height comprising approximately 2,200 pieces by 350 artists, including Ai Weiwei and Cao Fei, is the biggest in the world. In 2012, he donated the bulk of it, a total of 1,510 pieces, to M+, Hong Kong’s museum of visual culture, ahead of its opening.
Yet the Swiss collector’s professional journey has nothing to do with art: he did a PhD in law; in his youth, he was first a business journalist, and then went on to become a diplomat and a businessman. “I chose to put myself under pressure to change my life every few years, so as not to remain complacent but keep learning,” he tells Tatler.
Sigg’s first exposure to China was in the late 1970s, when he was sent to work on a project there. He returned to the country in the 1990s, when he was appointed as Switzerland’s ambassador to China, a pivotal posting that gave him front-row access to a country in transformation.