Gems from Swiss patron's mammoth collection of contemporary Chinese art on show at SongEun

Installation view of "SIGG: Chinese Contemporary Art from the Sigg Collection," mounted at SongEun in Seoul's Gangnam District. Photo by CJY Art Studio. Courtesy of SongEun Art and Cultural Foundation and the artists

By Park Han-sol

When the young Swiss businessman Uli Sigg first made his trip to China in 1979, a year after Deng Xiaoping's promulgation of the Open Door Policy, he quickly realized that he was only allowed a peek into a very small fragment of Chinese reality.

While being under the watchful eye of the Communist Party's state officials, he eventually found the country's barely budding contemporary art world to be the possible window to another reality.

Sigg would go on to visit hundreds of artists' studios across cities and small villages, becoming an unusual eyewitness to the emergence of contemporary Chinese art from day one ― which initially, in his words, looked "very derivative of Western art."

It was after years of careful observation that he began to notice the wind of change; by the late 1980s and early '90s, Chinese creators had found a language of their own. Dissident artist Ai Weiwei rose to the scene with his subversive, avant-garde works. A number of painters birthed the styles of political pop and cynical realism in response to modernizing China's changing economic and cultural landscape.

That's when Sigg, who came to serve as the Swiss ambassador to China, North Korea and Mongolia from 1995 to 1998, decided to purchase a few pieces for himself. Over the next three decades, his art trove grew to be an assemblage of some 2,500 works by more than 350 creatives, ranging from Cultural Revolution-inspired art to abstractions.

Uli Sigg, Swiss entrepreneur and prominent collector of contemporary Chinese art / Courtesy of SongEun Art and Cultural Foundation

His mission, the collector described, was to build an encyclopedic collection that "mirrors the art production of China," representing the historical span of the country's contemporary art across all mediums ― whether the works were to his liking or not.

It was a necessary undertaking that should have been carried out by the national museum. Until the late 1990s, a systematic art ecosystem was yet to exist in the country; there were virtually no galleries, dealers, or serious collectors and as a result, exhibitions and art sales were mostly done underground.

Sigg's collection of contemporary Chinese art, one of the world's most comprehensive and largest of its kind, came under the global spotlight in 2012 when he donated 1,463 pieces to the M+ museum in Hong Kong ― with an estimated worth of $165 million ― and sold off an additional 47.

Since then, the Swiss entrepreneur has freed himself from his self-assigned mission in art. But that does not mean he has stopped collecting altogether.

"It's very difficult to unlearn collecting," he said at SongEun in Seoul's Gangnam District, where a curated selection of 48 Chinese works among more than 600 that he had amassed after the massive donation to the M+ is on view.

"I've studied China through business and through politics, but the most entertaining and rewarding way is to study it through art."

These days, Sigg acquires pieces that reflect his personal taste and interest. And SongEun's "SIGG: Chinese Contemporary Art from the Sigg Collection," curated by Bernard Fibicher, offers a glimpse into the prominent collector's artistic palate for the first time in Korea.

Cao Yu's "The Thing in the Chest" (2020), left, and "Fountain" (2015). Photo by CJY Art Studio. Courtesy of SongEun Art and Cultural Foundation and the artist

A number of paintings spanning the museum's four floors remain in dialogue with the centuries-old Chinese art tradition but also put a new spin on it, Fibicher explained.

Ji Dachun's "Kill Kill" is one such example. At first glance, the piece incorporates all the basic elements of a traditional bamboo painting ― stem, knot, leaves and branches ― as prescribed by the classical Book of Bamboo.

However, a closer look reveals the artist's perversion of the whole system as the olive green plant is replaced by human bones, joints and pools of blood.

"Traditionally, bamboo is a symbol of long life, but here, you have the symbol of mortality," the curator noted.

Other pieces address the underrepresented status of female creators in the realm of contemporary Chinese performance and body art.

Cao Yu's "Fountain" shows a video of the artist spraying milk from her bare breasts into the air. This provocative "self-portrait" ― which recalls Marcel Duchamp's notorious readymade porcelain urinal "Fountain" (1917) and Bruce Nauman's photograph "Self Portrait as a Fountain" (1966-67) ― actively parodies the images of ejaculation conventionally associated with masculinity.

"This is the female and decidedly feminist counterpart of these male works. She does what the men cannot do with their body," Fibicher said.

From left, Shi Guowei's "Kyoto" (2017), Shen Shaomin's "Bonsai No. 19" (2015) and Charwei Tsai's "Bonsai Series IV" (2011). Photo by CJY Art Studio. Courtesy of SongEun Art and Cultural Foundation and the artists

While the exhibition itself is organized as a largely apolitical show, pieces that take a subtle jab at Beijing's sociopolitical climate are still hidden in plain sight.

The 27-minute musical video, "The Declaration of the Blind," produced by Zhu Jiuyang, portrays blind folk musicians fervently reciting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Chinese in a melody they composed.

Shen Shaomin's "Bonsai No. 19" features a metal instrument of torture that forcibly twists and deforms the barks of the tree symbolizing harmony and peace.

And in the museum's cave-like basement lies a hyperrealistic sculpture of a man who seems to have plummeted from the sky. This man, lying unceremoniously on the ground, is Ai Weiwei, according to the curator.

He Xiangyu's sculpture, "The Death of Marat," references Jacques-Louis David's famous painting of the same name that honors Jean-Paul Marat, the leader of the French Revolution, in an unconventional way as he is seen stabbed to death while lying naked in a bathtub.

Similarly, the Chinese artist pays tribute to Ai as "a martyr for the just cause, a figure standing in for human rights" while portraying him in an unheroic pose as if murdered by the invisible force. The work was born in 2011, when the famed creator was arrested by the state authorities and placed in detention for 81 days.

In describing the exhibition as a whole, Sigg said, "My ambition would not so much be that you remember the Sigg collection, but that you remember the Chinese artworks, the Chinese artists and the depth and width of Chinese art production."

Installation view of "SIGG: Chinese Contemporary Art from the Sigg Collection." Photo by CJY Art Studio. Courtesy of SongEun Art and Cultural Foundation and the artists

When asked whether he was willing to make another donation of his newly growing collection to the M+, the Swiss entrepreneur responded that he was still deliberating over that very matter.

"This is a very difficult issue. Of course, it would make sense to have everything in one hand in Hong Kong. But we are not so certain yet about the future," he said.

The collector's remark came as Hong Kong entered the third year of Beijing's hardening political grip marked by the introduction of the new National Security Law in 2020.

The threat of censorship from the Chinese Communist Party reached all the way to M+ when the museum decided not to display one of Ai's photographs, where the dissident artist was seen giving the middle finger to Beijing's Tiananmen Square, for its opening exhibit in 2021.

"In 2012, you could, in good faith, make the prediction that Hong Kong will have freedom of speech and freedom of art for the future," Sigg noted. "But things have changed. Politics took over."

It is still difficult to assess the full effect the National Security Law will have in the art world, he continued, since the legislation and the acts it criminalizes are not specifically tailored to creatives.

The collector did however add that some artists in China and Hong Kong may respond to the increasing political pressure by adopting a much more subtle practice.

"Artists may tend to resort to more subversive strategies that are not obvious to be detected by censorship. Or other artists may tend more to formalisms, abstract art, etc."

Installation view of "SIGG: Chinese Contemporary Art from the Sigg Collection." Photo by CJY Art Studio. Courtesy of SongEun Art and Cultural Foundation and the artists

To mark the arrival of his collection in Korea, Sigg also spoke about a moderate number of contemporary Korean artworks he has acquired ― produced from both sides of the border.

"I built a collection of North Korean art because this was accessible to me, but maybe not to other people," he said, recalling his multiple visits to the North in the 1990s during his term as the Swiss ambassador to the country. "And I also have a small collection of South Korean art."

While the North Korean paintings in his possession ― which glorify the country's leaders and natural landscape ― come from state-controlled studios, the South Korean works are of individual creators who all tackle the theme of the peninsula's division.

"I had a focus on the border situation between these two parts of what used to be one country. That fascinated me," Sigg continued.

In 2021, the collector mounted an exhibition entitled "Border Crossings" at the Kunstmuseum Bern, Switzerland, as a rare, simultaneous presentation of art hailing from both nations.

"SIGG: Chinese Contemporary Art from the Sigg Collection" runs through May 20 at SongEun.