Uli Sigg donates $163 million of Chinese contemporary art to Hong Kong Museum

Major art collector Uli Sigg is to donate the major part of his collection of Chinese contemporary art to Hong Kong’s M+ museum. The donation, which has been valued by the museum at HK$1.3 billion ($163 million), was announced today. “By joining forces with M+, the art works will ultimately come full circle back to China as I have always hoped they would,” Sigg said in a statement. “My intention is to return something to China for what it has allowed me to experience over the last 33 years: an incredible journey, whose most intense core has been formed by so many encounters with Chinese artists. This is my contribution: to enable these artists to have a space within M+ where they will communicate with an international audience, and where they will meet with a Chinese public. Having explored various opportunities, I am convinced that there is no better platform for my collection and for Chinese contemporary art than that which M+ can provide.” The Sigg Collection is universally recognized as the most comprehensive collection in the world of Chinese contemporary art from the 1970s to the present, and according to the chief executive of the WKCD, Michael Lynch, Sigg’s donation is “one of the largest and most valuable donations of artwork ever to have been made in the world to a single museum.”