Baron Guy Ullens de Schooten, a great Chinese contemporary art collector, died at the age of 90 on Saturday April 19, 2025. “After a successful career in business, he devoted himself to the arts and philanthropy, in particular by engaging in the contemporary Chinese artist scene in the 1980s”published on his site the UCCA Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing, which he had co -founded.
Born in 1935 in San Francisco, Guy Ullens was the son of Baron and Baroness Jean and Marie-Thérèse Ullens, from an ennobled line in 1693 by Charles II of Spain, while Belgium was under Spanish domination. His father was notably a diplomat at the Belgian Embassy in China.
After a law diploma and an MBA from the University of Stanford, Guy Ullens joined the family-friendly Tirlemontoise beet family business, playing a key role in his expansion in Asia in the 1980s. It was during these activities that he met his second wife, Myriam, whom he married in 1999. She died tragically in 2023, murdered by his step-son, Ullens, following a inheritance dispute.
With her, Guy Ullens is an important collection of around 1,500 pieces, first centered on ancient Chinese art, then oriented towards contemporary art, motivated by their meeting with the artist Ai Weiwei and by the desire to “Promote young artists”.
Their collection is described as “Universal” on the site of their Swiss Foundation. It includes, among others, works by Huang Yong Ping, Xu Zhen, Ai Weiwei, but also Western artists such as Tracey Emin, Rashid Johnson, and artists from Africa and the Middle East: Tayou, Hassan, Sharif.
In 2007, the couple founded the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, which became a real crossroads of the Chinese artistic scene in the district 798 of Beijing, converted into a village of artists. They sell the museum in 2017 to a group of Chinese investors, which renamed it “UCCA Center for Contemporary Art”.
The sale of his collection reaches records. In 2013, The Last Supper From Zeng Fanzhi, a satirical version of Leonardo da Vinci’s painting, is sold for $ 23.3 million, the highest bid ever reached for a work by a contemporary Asian artist.
“His heritage still continues in the institutions he has founded” and will contribute to “Shape and inspire the work and mission of the UCCA”said the museum. Since then, the institution has indeed expanded. In 2018, it opened a first antenna – UCCA DUNE – in Beidaihe (300 km west of Beijing), then a second in 2021 in Shanghai – Ucca Edge – and finally a third place in Yixing: UCCA Clay Art.
