October 2008

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He stops abruptly as we reach the storage room, anticipating his own excitement. The space is huge and windowless, like an aeroplane hanger. It is filled with high walls banked up against one another on rollers, so each can be wheeled out to make a succession of wide paths whose sides are covered with pictures, bottom to top. He wastes no time in getting a fix of his own art. His collection manager, Anne-Sophie Kreis, spins the big wheel at the end of one wall and we take the path she creates, stopping in front of a painting of a figure playing darts, Zhou Tiehai’s Aiming at the Museum (Fig. 5). ‘I love that guy,’ he enthuses. ‘You always have a different relation with him because you never know what he’s going to do, or whether he’ll put a team together to paint for him. I don’t even know if he painted this himself. It is a critique of China, of artists tailoring their art to the system.’ We move on up our path, glancing at five late-1980s pictures by Zhang Xiaogang, Mr Ullens providing commentary and memories. ‘I was fully busy up to 2000 when I stopped working. I bought a lot from Jean-Marc Decrop in Paris. He has enormous experience and I would visit his gallery but in China I spent my weekends with the artists. Our favourite spot was the Ming tombs. We’d take a big picnic there and have so many conversations – at that time, there was freedom of conversation but a lot of artists were under supervision.’

Another wall is wheeled across. ‘That’, he says stopping in front of a bright red picture by Yang Shaobin (Fig. 3), ‘that is too hard for me. I hesitated a lot in buying that.’ He returns to UCCA. ‘The Beijing museum is the kernel of a dream. First, we need credibility. You can’t do anything without that.’ He interrupts himself – again – when we arrive in front of four 1990s pictures by Xie Nanxing. ‘He’s really wonderful, probably the best painter in China. When I first met him, the dealer was very much afraid I would become too friendly. The situation now is totally different: we are commissioning, working with the artists.’ We walk on. ‘Where are we going now? Oh, ça j’adore!’, he cries, on seeing Wang Qingsong’s 2003 photograph Follow Me! ‘This is the intellectual, living a quiet life with ideas. It’s the opposite of me; it’s another life I’d choose. To me, the Chinese intellectual is coming back, getting respect again.’

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