Uli Sigg, a Taurus with blood type O, has a persistent, indomitable, and calm demeanor. He established the first Western joint venture in China, then became the Swiss Ambassador to China, and he has since become a very important collector of Chinese contemporary art. I believe that in the thirty years that Sigg has traveled between China and Europe, his behavior has not changed. He has hawk-like eyes with a strange and genial sparkle in them, when he persistantly questions people in a sincere manner, he cocks his head and the top part of his body sways as if he is taking solid steps, which tells you that in fact he already tacitly knows the answer. He is not easily persuaded; his questioning and attentive listening is only to confirm his sensitivity. For me, Sigg is like a strange bird, gathering this era’s unusual artistic evidence, flying here and there, self-confident and free. This strange bird is rarer than Maotai.

After the influential collection exhibition Mahjong, from May 21 to October 2, 2011, Sigg will be involved in another large-scale contemporary art exhibition Shan shui: Poetry without Sound at the Museum of Art in Lucerne, Switzerland. After this, the exhibition will move to the Musée Guimet in France in 2012 and then on to other important international museums. The exhibition took three years to prepare and more than 1200 square meters to hold the exhibition. The exhibition will show ancient painters such as Dong Qichang and Shen Zhou, as well as older artists such as Ai Weiwei, Xu Bing, and Hong Lei, and young artists like Zhang Xiaotao, Ni Youyu, and myself. Thus, we are presented with a conception of shan shui that is different from traditional shan shui. This exhibition reminds me that Sigg has transcended the idea of the average serious collector, becoming, just as he himself has said, “a researcher that collects the results of his research.”

                                                                                                                             ---- Peng Wei

With Shanshui the Museum of Art in Lucerne launches a new chapter in the international reception of Chinese Contemporary Art Shanshui – Poetry without Sound: Landscape in Chinese Contemporary Art from May 21 through to October 2, 2011. Curated by Ai Weiwei, Peter Fischer and Uli Sigg, it features  70 works from the Sigg Collecition and 15 Chinese Traditional in paintings by Chinese Masters from the Collection of the Rietberg Museum, Zurich and Musée Guimet, Paris.

In China, shanshui has been developing as a form of artistic expression for more than 1500 years. This painterly form, which literally translated means “mountain-water-painting,” is part of humanity’s cultural heritage. As the joint Swiss-Chinese project delved into the topic and especially into the question of shanshui’s continued relevance for a contemporary context, it encountered a highly complex field of research. Is shanshui still alive or is it just a beautiful dream, or a corpse?

Image and Article Courtesy of Peng Wei.

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PengWei: You’ve collected many Chinese contemporary artworks, but why create an exhibition around the traditional Chinese motif of shan shui? Are you involved in this exhibition because you have a new understanding of classical Chinese shan shui and Chinese contemporary art?

Uli Sigg: By reading and observing shan shui, I learned about its core importance in Chinese culture and about its many layers – actually quite different from Western landscape painting. Then I became interested in the differences and how its importance is reflected in Chinese contemporary art, and what the different options are for a contemporary Chinese artist in dealing with this glorious past.

Peng Wei: What do you think of the word “shan shui?” What is the difference between shan shui and the English word “landscape?”

Uli Sigg: No other language apart from Chinese, and maybe derivatives in Japanese and Korean, use this term. In English you have to use the word “landscape” as there is no shan shui concept in English or European culture. There landscape painting is about representing a real landscape, ideally as as possible, lacking the spiritual concept of shan shui.

Peng Wei: Is classical shan shui painting a significant part of Westerners’ overall imagination and understanding of Chinese painting? (Just as Chinese people would hear the term “Western art” and immediately think of certain sculptors and oil painters.)

Uli Sigg: There is almost no knowledge of Chinese painting in the West, with the exception of a very small interested group. For Western collectors shan shui comes across as a stream of landscape stereotypes, all very similar. This is another reason for this exhibition: to create an interest for a Western audience for an art which is considered an important heritage within the art world, but this exhibition will lead people through contemporary art while at the same time looking at old masterpieces which also form part of this exhibition.

Peng Wei: In the exhibition Shan shui, almost all of the works use materials, ideas, and techniques that are not part of traditional Chinese painting. Do you think that the Chinese shan shui tradition has had a significant impact on Chinese art today?

Uli Sigg: All Chinese artists have dealt with it in one way or another – drawing as a child, or maybe just seeing it everywhere, or even during some of their artistic education. It has left its mark, consciously or unconsciously. In the 80s and 90s, tradition in general had very little appeal to contemporary artists. It was all about new ideas from the West. Now I see many artists turning to tradition for inspiration. Many have exploited Western concepts and feel kind of disillusioned about them and hope for new impulses from the traditional art.

Peng Wei: The conceptual foundations for almost all of the contemporary works in this exhibition come from the West; these foundations have of course been sincized. In your view, is this sinicization truly related to the influence of traditional Chinese shan shui painting? Or is traditional shan shui just a symbol or an excuse in these contemporary works?

In other words, is your personal interest in this topic and this exhibition attempting to see whether historical influences, designs, and spirits truly exist in Westernized Chinese contemporary artists, or if these elements have already been misunderstood and consumed?

Uli Sigg: Yes, my interest is very much to research this question and I see the exhibition as a kind of platform to show the spectrum as broad as it can be. Works of artists who intend to continue using traditional art form; of artists that want to give it a new breath of life; of artists that take a more far reaching look, some seeing it as a beautiful dream, others as a corpse; of those who mock traditional art - and ultimately of artists that have no relationship whatsoever to shan shui any more, for whom landscape is an object to represent like any other, without any spiritual meaning. In my view all these positions exist in one way or another in this exhibition, clear at times and obtuse at others. It is not up to me and my co-curators but to the observer to label them. As to sinicization: The world adds new artistic strategies, languages and media almost every day. They have the potential to express a spiritual meaning or the opposite, something Chinese or an alternative, they can be used or abused, in honesty or as fakes – why should they not possess the possibility to represent the shan shui concept?

Peng Wei: Do you believe that the experiments of Chinese contemporary art are attempting to dialogue with history? Or do these experiments borrow historical symbols to dialogue with the West or attract the attention of the West?

Uli Sigg: Again, if we look at the exhibition, some artists really dialogue with history, though for some the public will not be able to comprehend the artists' intention, and some may just want to attract the attention of Western buyers – but this may be a futile approach since Western people are not familiar with shan shui, or not as they are with political symbols like Mao.

Peng Wei: Lastly, do you think that the Shan shui exhibition is a manifestation of the “China brand?” In China, the “China brand” is a persistent challenge to local contemporary art, because this idea is directed at Westerners like you. Do you agree? What do you think?

ULi Sigg: Of course there is the phenomenon of “China Brand”. If the platform of this exhibition wants to be coherent, it must also contain such examples. It is up to you as an observer to find out which ones...but many works just manifest a serious discourse with tradition, which the artists mainly possess themselves, for inspiration or just as often for their own mental health, to come to grips with this tradition, to make peace, or to erase it from their minds.

Peng Wei: I know that you have a broad interest in art; which medium do you personally prefer? Or is it all media? Do all media have things in common?

Uli Sigg: I have no preference for a medium but I have a preference for works made in the most adequate medium for what the artist wants to say – that may mean at times that the artist would have been better using prose rather than visual art to express himself.

Peng Wei: Your collection seems to me to be a comprehensive sampling of Chinese contemporary art, rather than just what you like. Is this the case? Is this exhibition a reflection of this approach to collecting?

Uli Sigg: Your understanding of my collecting is correct. I want to create through my collecting a document about Chinese contemporary art which is sorely missing, in China and abroad. It is not really about my personal taste. This sampling, as you call it, allows me to make just such an exhibition: to show a reasonably broad spectrum of artistic reflections on Shan shui - or other topics - and what its' boundaries are, rather than what I personally think are the top ten works of this discipline.

Peng Wei: Every time I see you, you seem very independent, especially in China. You take cabs and you don’t have an assistant; you come and go as you please. Is it like that? Does collecting make you more independent? What is the most important thing that collecting gives you?

 Uli Sigg: This independence is the biggest gift I can make to myself. When, if not now – I am old enough! Collecting has nothing to do with it. But collecting gives me the broadest, deepest and most intense access to the Chinese.

Peng Wei: You’ve personally witnessed the last thirty years of China’s Reform and Opening; what is your most direct experience of it? In those thirty years, do you think your understanding of China has improved?

Uli Sigg: Yes, my understanding of China has definitely improved. This has not been very difficult: as when I arrived late 70s, it was virtually zero.

Peng Wei: When you return to Europe after visiting China, do you see Europe differently?

Uli Sigg: Yes, each time I realize how slow and unexciting and quiet we are in comparison – and how rich in preserved culture and urban and natural environment we are, since we had the fortune to be given centuries to reflect on where China is allowing herself only decades.

Peng Wei: Over the years, you’ve met many Chinese artists; have you noticed a change in them? What is it? How are they different from the European artists you’ve encountered?

Uli Sigg: With the initiation of contemporary China, for more than a decade artists did art for no material gain, without the existence of a market – unlike their peers in the west where many had a market concern built in with their artistic strategies. Now the Chinese have caught up, of course there would be much more to say on this question than just the material aspect…

Peng Wei: I know that you take your collection very seriously. I believe that this is not only for art’s sake. What is your deeper motivation? Is China your motivation for collecting these contemporary artworks?

Uli Sigg: You are right: collecting - or much better researching contemporary Chinese art has become my most favored inroad to learn about my ultimate study object: China. I see myself not so much as a collector, but as a researcher who is fortunate to be able to collect some of the results of this research.

Peng Wei: Truthfully, how do other Western collectors view you?

Uli Sigg: First they used to think of me to be very stupid to sink my energy and my money into Chinese contemporary art. Now many think I am a farsighted genius. I do not know which assumption is more silly.