July & August 2008

Explore the Apollo archive

Look back over two vibrant years of Apollo: browse every issue from January 2006 to the present day.

Guy Ullens believes passionately in China’s bright future. Which is why this Belgian businessman has been buying contemporary Chinese art since the 1980s, sold off his Turners to accelerate his collecting and created the Ullens Centre for Contemporary Art (UCCA) in a disused factory in Beijing without a drop of financial support from the host country (Fig. 1). It opened last November with a flourish, Mr Ullens arriving at each event with his wife, Myriam, on his arm (Fig. 2). He credits ‘Mimi’ with having the ‘huge experience and a foreign woman’s diplomacy skills’ to complement his more raw entrepreneurial skills in this enterprise. As he moved from guest to guest, his bronzed face sparkled with charm and broad smiles as he talked in a fast flow of words, switching seamlessly between English, French, Flemish and German.

It is amid the festivities that we first meet, and secure the UCCA galleries to ourselves for a moment, so he can show me some of his favourite works in the inaugural exhibition, ‘85 New Wave: The Birth of Chinese Contemporary Art’. A selection from his collection is mixed with other loans. ‘I think this is mine… yes!’, he says happily on inspecting the label beside Yu Youhan’s 1986 – 3’, an acrylic painting made in 1986, adding apologetically, ‘We have a busy life which has a big cost, being superficial.’ He grins, then focuses. ‘This artist we continue to know.…When we met him he let us go to his apartment – this is how you used to see artists’ work. He slowly unlocked the pictures. Suddenly, he showed us five paintings he chose and we bought them. They were made at his most creative period. He’s an old man now, told me he wants to live for eternity.’

As we move on, he tells the stories of acquiring this piece and that, a process he dubs ‘running around Beijing smelling the air’. This delectable task he has, with regret, handed to his UCCA staff. ‘I’m really a team builder, picking up young people, pulling them together, pushing them forward.’ We go inside the arrangement of Yang Jiechang’s four-part Layers of Ink, Rothko-like vertical canvases of deep, infinity black, exhibited to form four sides of a room. ‘The sad thing about these artists is they don’t realise these are going to be key poles of the future.’ He pauses, silent, a rarity. ‘Will these become icons? Well, I could sit here on the concrete and stay forever and just feel the energy that comes from them. This is the first time I’ve seen them hanging together like this, so beautifully lit. I usually just look at one, in the store where I keep my collection – you’ll come and see it, won’t you?’

Print this article   |  Email to a friend |  Subscription offers | Comment

1   2   3   4   Next