Sigg art collection the foundation for world-class M+ museum

At the core of the M+ vision lies the ambition to build a pre-eminent collection of 20th- and 21st-century visual culture, encompassing art, design, architecture and moving image from Hong Kong, China, and expanding through Asia and the rest of the world.

The collection will form the backbone of the museum, being constantly in dialogue with its temporary exhibitions and educational mandate. It will provide historical references to help inform contemporary practices while offering fertile ground for continuous reinterpretation and re-evaluation as the museum evolves over future generations.

The collection is being shaped by a number of strategies defined by geography, disciplinary and cross-disciplinary boundaries, and a multiplicity of historical and contemporary narratives, all intermingling within the complexity of visual culture.

Each poses its own challenges, but from day one it was clear that one major hurdle would be how to chronicle, elucidate and build on, through our collection, the rapid and extraordinary development of contemporary art in the opening up of China in the post-Cultural Revolution era.

Many early works in this area were no longer available, or simply no longer existed. And those that did had become very expensive, sometimes prohibitively so. Building a museum collection from scratch has never been easy. But with the globalisation of art, and the market for it, the challenge has become more difficult than ever.

That said, students of the history of the leading museums of the world, be it New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim or the Tate in London, soon find that their collections invariably started with one or several early donations. Later, gaps would be filled in, and new stories and perspectives would be added; but these first donations formed the foundations around which their collections further developed. A natural first step for M+ was to open discussions with a number of collectors whose interests might be aligned with ours. In the field of contemporary Chinese art, we were fortunate to come in contact with Dr Uli Sigg.