IW: What is your attitude to the relationship between the Ullens’ organisation here and their personal collection, some of which has of course been sold off (that which featured in the exhibitions here)?
JS: My attitude when I came here was to make a clear distinction between the two things so that this place would not be just a warehouse or a showroom for the collection for a simple reason: you can take the collection, or a fragment, and make it interesting once, maybe twice, but what about the third time? It’s not so exciting because it becomes too…egotistical. The proposal we had was really to make UCCA into a house dedicated to Chinese artists and creators, meaning a place to experiment, a place to share, and not just a place to display what Guy and Miriam are or would be interested in. For me it was maybe one of the reasons for the success as well, that we are not obliged to refer to the market or to the collection, but to possibility.
IW: You will leave UCCA in December. What ideas you are incubating at the moment? What is next?
JS: My mind is incubating every minute! I react to what people say next to me so I adapt, always, on site, with the context and with the people around me. In other words, I am not abandoning China. My contact with UCCA has been a fantastic chance that Guy and Miriam have given me — I don’t know how to explain to you — to give back to China what my Chinese friends have been giving me all these years. There is no reason for me to leave.
IW: What have been the high points — and the low points — of working at UCCA?
JS: It has been a truly unique and marvelous experience that has changed my life and perspective.
IW: What bores you about the art world?
JS: (Laughs). The non-creativity of people who play the game, who feel they are creative but who are not. What bores me most is when there is no engagement, no difference, and the obsession sometimes of the art world with looking the same as their neighbors. I never understand why all museums are the same, the entrances are the same, they all communicate in the same way…Most of the time, museum directors look like bankers. I don’t understand why there is this fear of being different.
