The M+ Sigg Collection is one of the largest and most comprehensive collections of contemporary Chinese art in the world. It chronicles the development of Chinese art over four decades, from 1972 to 2012. Its unrivalled holdings of 1,510 works encompass a broad range of styles and mediums, including painting, printmaking, sculpture, performance, photography, and digital art. Some of the earliest works in the collection are by the No Name Group and the Stars Art Group—underground art collectives that are considered by some to be precursors of contemporary art in China. As a whole, the collection provides a powerful framework for examining one of the most culturally dynamic periods in modern Chinese history, starting from the end of the Cultural Revolution, through China’s economic reforms of the 1980s, the urbanisation of the 1990s, and the era of globalisation in the 2000s, up until the year of the collection’s establishment in 2012.

The M+ Sigg Collection is an extraction from Swiss collector Uli Sigg’s private collection, which has been documenting the development of contemporary art, with a focus on Chinese art, since the early 1990s.