{"id":101860,"date":"2020-01-30T15:47:23","date_gmt":"2020-01-30T14:47:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.castellodirivoli.org\/mostra\/facing-the-collector-the-sigg-collection-of-contemporary-art-from-china\/"},"modified":"2025-12-24T11:32:09","modified_gmt":"2025-12-24T10:32:09","slug":"facing-the-collector-the-sigg-collection-of-contemporary-art-from-china","status":"publish","type":"mostra","link":"https:\/\/www.castellodirivoli.org\/en\/mostra\/facing-the-collector-the-sigg-collection-of-contemporary-art-from-china\/","title":{"rendered":"Facing the Collector. The Sigg Collection of Contemporary Art from China"},"content":{"rendered":"

Facing the Collector. The Sigg Collection of Contemporary Art from China<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Curated by Marcella Beccaria<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art presents Facing the Collector: The Sigg Collection of Contemporary Art from China<\/em><\/strong>, the first exhibition in Italy of the important collection of Uli Sigg <\/strong>(Lucerne, 1946), recognised as the most important collection of contemporary Chinese art in the world. The exhibition is curated by Marcella Beccaria, Chief Curator and Curator of Collections.<\/p>\n

The first entrepreneur to travel to China in 1979 for Schindler, following the declaration of the Open Door Policy, Uli Sigg developed economic relations and drew up the business model adopted by China, opening the door to investment and essentially contributing to invent Chinese model of state capitalism. Sigg was the creator of the first joint venture company between the People\u2019s Republic of China and the West, and spent many years in China, where he intertwined relationships and friendships with numerous artists, identifying art as an extraordinary tool to better understand Chinese culture and life in depth. In a context initially devoid of cultural institutions dedicated to contemporary art, Sigg made collecting an opportunity for personal exploration. By frequenting artists\u2019 studios assiduously, directly acquiring from them multiple works of art, while also assisting the emergence of private galleries which at the time did not exist, Sigg encouraged the creative paths of contemporary China.<\/p>\n

The Sigg collection, which consists of around 2,500 works by over 500 artists, is not limited to the collector\u2019s aesthetic taste alone, but reflects an encyclopedic vision that aims to document the evolution of Chinese art from the late 1970s to today.<\/p>\n

After an initial period as an entrepreneur in China from 1979 to the early 1990s, Sigg returned there to serve as Swiss Ambassador to China, North Korea and Mongolia from 1995 to 1998. During this period, he thus played a fundamental role as a cultural ambassador, promoting the awareness of Chinese art in an international context. In 1997 he launched the Chinese Contemporary Art Award (CCAA): an annual award for contemporary Chinese artists who live in China and who, through the involvement of international directors and curators in the jury, contributed to the subsequent spread of Chinese art in many museums all over the world. Sigg\u2019s relationship with Harald Szeemann played a pivotal role: the legendary curator was among the jurors of the first edition of the CCAA, after which he invited nineteen Chinese artists to the 1999 Venice Biennale, exhibiting their works in Europe for the first time. Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev\u2019s service on the jury in 2012 was also connected to her inclusion of Chinese artists in dOCUMENTA(13) that same year, such as Song Dong\u2019s Do nothing garden<\/em>.<\/p>\n

In 2012, Sigg decided to donate 1,450 works from his collection to the M+ Museum for Visual Arts in Hong Kong, which will be partially open to the public in December 2020, thereby returning an important part of recent cultural history to China.<\/p>\n

The exhibition at Castello di Rivoli, which welcomes visitors with works installed in the building\u2019s atrium, along the staircase of honor and in the galleries on the second floor, is developed in close contact with the collector and the artists and presents a precise selection from the Sigg Collection and M+ Sigg Collection. It documents some of the collection\u2019s distinctive characters through a choice of thematic and monographic rooms. The first room appears as an \u201carchive\u201d in which some of the first works purchased and installed at Sigg\u2019s home in Switzerland and some of the many portraits that the artists have dedicated to him over the years are on view. As testimony to the close friendships established by Sigg, the center of the room is occupied by the monumental Fragments<\/em>(2005) by Ai Weiwei<\/strong>, one of the artists closest to him and present in the collection with numerous works, while the important work by Feng Mengbo\u00a0<\/strong>testifies to Sigg\u2019s contribution as the commissioner of new works.<\/p>\n

Sigg\u2019s attention to the profound social and political transformations that have gone through China in recent decades can be seen in several works on display, including those by Sun Yuan & Peng Yu<\/strong>, Liu Ding<\/strong>and Mao Tongqiang<\/strong>. Sigg\u2019s interest in the rich cultural traditions of China and in comparing the aesthetic ideas of East and West can be found in the rooms respectively dedicated to Shao Fan\u00a0<\/strong>and Liu Wei<\/strong>. A recurring theme in the history of Chinese art \u2013 the landscape \u2013 unites several works in the collection, from patterns that outline the new digital horizons of aaajiao<\/strong>, coming to include deeply spiritual notes as in the case of monochrome works, at the limit of the visible, by Qiu Shi Hua<\/strong>.<\/p>\n