Ulrich Sigg has amassed the world's largest collection of contemporary Chinese art. Now, growing competition from Asian collectors is pricing him out of a market he helped create.

The former Swiss diplomat and businessman says he can no longer afford to buy some artists' work and plans instead to focus on projects such as financing artworks and using personal contacts to discover new talent.

"There are so many galleries and individuals chasing Chinese art," he says in an interview at the Fine Arts Museum in the Swiss capital, Bern, where 340 works, or about a quarter of his collection, are on show.

"They snap up everything good, bad, indiscriminately. This is a big problem in the market."

What's new, Sigg says, is the interest from Asian and Chinese collectors who are prepared to pay almost any price for the works of the most famous artists. This demand will likely persist, but the outcome could be a two-tier market for Chinese modern art, one international and one Asian, he said.

Sigg is a victim of his own success. It was he who persuaded the organizers of the Venice Biennale to include Chinese works in the 1999 art festival, raising awareness in the West, and Germany followed with an exhibition of Chinese modern art to mark the visit of President Jiang Zemin in 2001.

Coy About Favourites

Sigg, 59, is coy about discussing his favourites. He has met more than 1,000 artists in a decade of collecting and considers many of them friends. He's concerned not to upset anyone by omitting them from his list.

Besides, he doesn't buy simply what he likes. His aim has been to record a period in the country's art history because nobody else was doing it.

"Not every work is a masterpiece, but it will document something well," he says. "It was always about documenting the spectrum, not from the best to the worst, but in terms of topics, techniques and concerns."

Sigg says he has been interested in contemporary art since he was a young man, so it was natural for him to take an interest in the Chinese art scene when he went to the country for professional reasons more than two decades ago.

In 1980, he started the first joint venture between a Western and a Chinese company as an executive at Swiss-based elevator maker Schindler Holding AG, and was Switzerland's ambassador to China and North Korea from 1995 to 1998.

"For me, this collecting is access to China," he says. "I had access as a businessperson, establishing this joint venture, access as a diplomat, as Swiss ambassador, and access through the Chinese art. And each time you see a completely different reality."

At one end of the collection's spectrum are oil paintings of happy peasants and heroic factory workers in the Revolutionary Realist style .

At the other end are works like Ruan, by Xiao Yu, that have shocked some visitors to the Bern exhibition. Ruan is an installation made from the head of a human fetus with sewn-on rabbit's eyes and the body of a bird.

Sigg says the implicit or explicit violence in many of the works is a reflection of the tensions in Chinese society caused by a growing gap in incomes and in rural and urban lifestyles.

He sees his achievement as having brought contemporary Chinese art to the surface in the West and to the attention of the Chinese authorities.

Shanghai Flour Mill

Sigg's collection is rooted in the old Fuxin Flour Mill on Moganshan Road in Shanghai, the epicentre of China's contemporary art scene.

It's here, inside the refurbished granaries and warehouses along Suzhou Creek, that Swiss art dealer Lorenz Helbing in 1995 opened ShanghART, the country's first modern art gallery and staging ground for the artists whose works are now with Sigg or on display in global museums such as the Pompidou Centre in Paris

"The art world in China is a strange one," the 44-year-old Helbing says. "The Chinese don't buy or exhibit the works of their most important artists like Pu Jie and Ji Wenyu."

Helbing says Chinese collectors and museum curators prefer to watch what foreigners purchase and then, once the work has achieved notoriety in the West, buy them back.

"The Chinese art market is not yet sophisticated or knowledgeable about its own artists," Helbing says."The power of selection and interpretation over contemporary Chinese art rests not with Chinese people but with people like me," Sigg says. "It's a threat at some point.

This is the biggest cultural space in the world, so why should they have foreigners determining what's good and what's bad?"

There is at least one work Sigg likes, because it sums up China's political situation and brazen modernity.

Bloomberg News

(China Daily 12/05/2005 page7)