30 Private Art Collections in China

What does an art collector in China need? How do the local and the global articulate? The intimate and the facade? Taste and class conventions? The interiors documented by the artist in the course of a meticulous investigation that gave him a glimpse of rarely visited places allow him to detect the cultural mutations that are at work in China. The book thus bears witness to a key period in the contemporary history of this country, which saw the repatriation of Chinese antiquities and the exponential infatuation of the new Chinese bourgeoisie with international contemporary art. In this context, the discussion between the artist and the sinophile collector Uli Sigg, as well as the contribution of Jean-Jacques de Dardel, former Swiss ambassador in Beijing, shed light on the complex links that unite Switzerland, a hub and a free zone for global contemporary art, with China, which demands its place and weighs heavily on this market.