When Uli Sigg announced last month that he would be donating close to 1,500 pieces from his collection of Chinese contemporary art to M+ (the museum planned for the West Kowloon Cultural District), the decision was applauded both locally and internationally.
Although the collection, with an estimated value of HK$1.3 billion, won't be going on show for another five years or so, the former Swiss ambassador to China says this is the right thing to do at the right time.
'I had the wish to do it while I'm alive, to have the chance to put it together and put it in the right home. It's a strange attitude to wait until you drop dead to find a solution, so I must do it now,' the 66-year-old says. 'Now there are museums being built in Hong Kong, Shanghai [and] Beijing. This is a moment to be involved. This is a moment to make a decision.'
The Sigg Collection, which contains more than 2,000 pieces including contemporary artworks dating back to 1979, is significant in that it charts the development of the genre - and the mainland - around the time when late paramount leader Deng Xiaoping initiated his reform-and-opening programme.
The collection, which is reportedly being housed in Sigg's Swiss home, the Mauensee Castle near Lucerne, has been a way for the former diplomat to understand modern China. Sigg first arrived in Beijing in 1979 as a representative of a Swiss engineering company in charge of setting up the mainland's first joint venture with a western firm. When he began building his collection in the early 1990s he was surprised that no one was already doing it.
'[It] felt like going to Paris and I [couldn't] see Impressionist works,' he says. 'In hindsight, this was a very important period in Chinese history, and therefore the works produced by contemporary and experimental artists during that period will be very important ... Here's a wealth of art being produced but [it was] being ignored. I thought this very odd.'