SONGEUN Art and Cultural Foundation has been organising collection exhibitions to survey the directions of significant contemporary art collections. For the first collection exhibition in our new building, we are very proud to present Chinese contemporary art that belongs to world-renowned art collector Uli Sigg.

Dr. Sigg followed the Chinese art scene from its beginnings in the late 70s continuing throughout the 1990s while serving as Switzerland's ambassador to China, Mongolia, and North Korea. Over the years, he has built the world's leading collection of Chinese contemporary art with an encyclopaedic approach. In 2012, Sigg donated 1,463 Chinese contemporary artworks to M+ in Hong Kong, under The M+ Sigg Collection. Today, this new landmark museum presents exhibitions showcasing the artistic developments in China over the past four decades at its Sigg Galleries.

SIGG: Chinese Contemporary Art from the Sigg Collection is the first-ever introduction of Sigg's personal collection to the Korean audience and encompasses internationally recognised artists such as Ai Weiwei, Shen Shaomin, Ji Dachun, Yan Lei, and He Xiangyu, along with recent works of the next generation of emerging Chinese artists to offer a glimpse into the present and future of Chinese art. We look forward to welcoming you to this first exhibition of Uli Sigg's collection in Korea.

SIGG: Chinese Contemporary Art from the Sigg Collection

Uli Sigg is undoubtedly the largest and influential private collector of contemporary Chinese art in the world. He has contributed to the founding collection of the renowned M+ Museum in Hong Kong and is currently a member of the International Council of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City as well as the International Advisory Council of the Tate Gallery in London. In 1998 he established the Chinese Contemporary Art Award, which is now known as the Art Critic Award. Moreover, he was the one to introduce Harald Szeemann to contemporary Chinese art; Szeemann was a legendary Swiss curator who presented many Chinese artists in his coordination of the 1999 Venice Biennale, catalysing the movement and influence of Chinese art on the Western market.

Uli Sigg started his career as a business journalist. He arrived in Beijing in the late 1970s for his work at the Swiss company Schindler Elevators to establish what would later become the very first joint venture between China and international markets. This period marked the end of Mao's dictatorial regime with Mao's passing in 1976 and the end of the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), launching the start of Deng Xiaoping's market economy reforms in 1978. This autonomous policy gradually allowed for more criticism to emerge, eventually leading to the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989. Alongside the political reform, cultural transformations were also taking place resulting in many new forms of artistic expression.

Artists who had lost their status' as state employees started to emancipate themselves from social realism, and as time went on, from the imbedded structure of the Western contemporary art models. This period undeniably proved to be a highly challenging yet pivotal moment in time. Uli Sigg eagerly followed the art scene and its underground movements, and started to collect works from the 1990s. He gradually developed a systematic approach: 'I decided to do what a national institution ought to do but never did: to collect Chinese contemporary art in a systematic way from the late 1970s onwards, mirroring Chinese art production across all media in its width and depth from its very beginnings. I must have met close to 2,000 artists over the years. I mostly purchased directly from the artists themselves, due to- at least initially- sheer necessity; there was not yet an art ecosystem with functioning galleries or dealers as there is today'. Uli Sigg served as the Swiss Ambassador to China, North Korea and Mongolia from 1995 to 1998, during a time in which contemporary Chinese art gained global recognition and simultaneously discovered its cultural roots. 'The more we understand the West, the more we cherish our own culture. Our traditional culture, socialist culture and even Cultural Revolution and Maoism are valuable. Only if and when we are able to combine these traditions with the Western culture, can we create art of the future...', writes Xu Bing in his 2007 retrospective.

Uli Sigg had always cherished his wish to hand his collection back to China. The institutions and policies in Hong Kong at the time seemed to provide the appropriate context for this endeavour. Thus, in 2012, Uli Sigg donated 1,453 works and sold a further 47 works to M+ Museum in Hong Kong, which makes it one of the largest donations to a museum ever to be made by a private collector, positioning M+ as the world's number one museum for Chinese contemporary art. He kept around 300 works for himself but felt the urge to continue to collect, currently owning more than 600 Chinese works, a selection of which is now on view at SONGEUN in Seoul.

This selection cannot serve as a full representation of the entire collection. Nevertheless, the chapters of the exhibition exemplify a broad scope of works alongside a variety of viewpoints and sensitivities. Pure Painting – Towards Abstraction and a new installation by Han Mengyun can be found on Level 2. Body – The Revenge of the Female and Nature – Acculturated are presented on level 3. The chapter Material Stories brings together a series of sculptures. An immersive video installation can be discovered in the basement.

Press release courtesy SONGEUN Art and Cultural Foundation.