In this video, film director Michael Schindhelm presents scenes from his 2016 documentary 'The Chinese Lives of Uli Sigg'. The film portrait is dedicated to the lawyer, entrepreneur, art collector, and former Swiss ambassador in Beijing Uli Sigg. Sigg has been collecting contemporary Chinese art since the late 1970s, when he set up a joint venture in China for the Swiss company Schindler. He donated most of his collection to the Museum of Visual Culture M+ in Hong Kong. The film includes comments from companions and artists such as Ai Weiwei and Fang Lijun. Following the screening, E.A.T. curator Hans Ulrich Obrist and Schindhelm join in a discussion about Communist China in the 1980s, the Chinese cultural scene, and Sigg’s work at the Swiss Embassy in Beijing.
“When the Wall fell it was for me something like a relief and I felt free, and I think freedom was the most important value to me, and until today the most important value. I see in particular in our Western countries today there is an enormous search for security, for safety, not so much for freedom anymore.”
— Michael Schindhelm
