瑞士驻中国的前任大使乌利·希克(Uli Sigg利用职务之便

收集了不少中国当代前卫艺术作品，比如方力钧的。

他倒是很有眼光和前瞻性

外交官、艺术收藏家、企业家

中国通乌利·希克(Uli Sigg)被瑞士联邦委员会选派为2010上海世博会的瑞士官方代表。他因此也成为世博会瑞士馆设计竞赛的评委会主席。

乌利·希克1946年出生，曾在苏黎世大学学习法律。从1973年开始，他曾担任荣格集?Ringier)《Finanz und Wirtschaft》(《金融与经济》)的记者。

他于1977年加入迅达集团(Schindler)，并于1980年促使中国与西方国家(瑞士迅达)成立了第一家合资企业。

1995-1998年，他曾在北京任瑞士驻中华人民共和国、朝鲜及蒙古大使。

乌利·希克现任荣格集团理事会副总裁，CIBA特种化学品公司理事及中国发展银行顾问(北京)。

Modern China comes to life through art Image caption: One of the works in the exhibition features Mao hailing a taxi (swissinfo) Related storyA Swiss artist's love of sunsets One of the most important collections of contemporary Chinese art, owned by a former Swiss ambassador to China, has gone on show at Bern’s Fine Arts Museum. The exhibition in the Swiss capital highlights Uli Sigg’s long love affair with the genre and documents the artistic and social changes that China has undergone over the past 25 years. There are 350 works from Sigg’s extensive collection on display at the exhibition, which offers an overview of the Chinese avant-garde art scene from 1979-2004. Sigg, now deputy chairman of the Ringier media group, has had close links with China since the late 1970s. From 1995-98 he served as Swiss ambassador to the country and still travels to China several times a year. Sigg and his wife, Rita, were among the first people to start collecting modern Chinese art in the 1990s. "When I first came to China in 1979 I was not really moved by Chinese art," Sigg told swissinfo. "Perhaps this was because I was looking at it through the eyes of a westerner, or perhaps because it was only in the 1980s that Chinese art became interesting in the eyes of a westerner," he said. Uli Sigg’s collection is extensive (swissinfo) Notoriety The result is a collection of around 1,200 works by 180 artists, which has earned Sigg a certain notoriety in China. "This Swiss has become a very strange phenomenon in China," said Ai Weiwei, an influential modern Chinese artist and co-curator of the exhibition. "He has been to every corner of the country, in regions where I would never go, to put together the most complete and detailed collection of Chinese art in the world," he told swissinfo. The exhibition, entitled "Mahjong – Contemporary Chinese Art from the Sigg Collection", is the museum’s largest ever undertaking, which means that most of its usual exhibits have been cleared away for the four-month-long event. A further 25 large works are on display at cement giant Holcim at Holderbank in canton Aargau from June 21 to August 28. The display in Bern – which curators describe as a coup, coming at the same time as the Paul Klee museum opens in the city – features all forms of contemporary art, including paintings, sculptures, video and installations. According to Weiwei, who has also worked with Swiss star architects Herzog and de Meuron on their Olympic stadium project in Beijing, Sigg has assembled works of art "with a care and precision which is surely part of the Swiss character". Probably a quarter of the works in my collection couldn’t be shown in China. Uli Sigg, art collector Transformation But he says that the collection is not just about art, as it also represents the social and economic development which has taken place in China over the past few decades. Matthias Frehner, the director of the Kunstmuseum, agrees: "Like industry and the economy, art has also undergone a transformation in the past 15 to 20 years, a process which took at least a century in the West." Under the communist regime of Chairman Mao, art had largely been used for propaganda or educational purposes. After the dictator died, artists began to experiment, and a diverse and dynamic art scene emerged. "The incredible power of innovation and experimentation by Chinese artists appears in all its intensity when you compare their works with those of western artists," said Frehner. "While our creativity has been for many years showing signs of wear and tear, Chinese art has been addressing existential questions, expressing a new political consciousness or showing the social reality," he added. Tension Many of the works clearly reflect the tension between socialist ideas still in circulation in China and the consumerism unleashed by capitalist reforms. In one image, Mao, with his arm raised in a salute, is shown hailing a taxi. In another, the dollar and the Chanel and Coca-Cola logos have been integrated into traditional Chinese pictures. But Sigg says that the taboo-breaking nature of the collection means that it is far more likely to be accepted on the international art scene than in its country of origin. "Probably a quarter of the works in my collection couldn’t be shown in China," explained Sigg. "But in many cases, the leaders in China would not even understand the political, social and artistic significance of these works." swissinfo http://swissinfo.org/eng/front/detail/Modern_China_comes_to_life_through_art.html?siteSect=105&sid=5875901&cKey=1120461540000