Guy Ullens, a Belgian billionaire who built up one of the most important collections of Chinese contemporary art in the world, has died at 90. The news was announced on social media by the UCCA Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing, which Ullens had cofounded. The museum did not provide a cause.
“As one of the earliest international collectors to champion Chinese artists, Ullens helped bring global recognition to Chinese artists and their work,” the UCCA said on Instagram. “His dedicated efforts also shaped the foundation for UCCA’s growth into the institution we are today, in China and globally. … We remember him with deep respect and gratitude. His legacy endures—in the institutions he founded, the artists he championed, and in the communities he helped build—and will continue to shape and inspire UCCA’s work and mission.”
Ullens began collecting art in the 1960s “with a focus on new territories and pioneer artists,” according to his eponymous foundation’s website. But when he first started doing business in China in 1984, his collecting interests took a turn that would ultimately define his legacy.
Initially, he began buying Chinese antiquities, including scroll paintings from the Song, Yuan, Ming, and Qing dynasties. That led him to meet Chinese contemporary artists like Ai Weiwei at a moment when the scene was significantly expanding, as Ullens told the Wall Street Journal in 2013.
With his late wife Myriam, Ullens would go on to buy important works by Liu Xiaodong, Liu Wei, Zeng Fanzhi, Huang Yong Ping, Wang Keping, and more, often for relatively low prices. His collection would eventually comprise between 1,500 and 2,000 works, with much of it stored in Geneva. The couple ranked on the ARTnews Top 200 Collectors list each year between 2008 and 2015.
In 2007, the couple established the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing’s 798 Art Zone as a private museum for their collection. The institution can be partially credited with setting off a wave of private museums that sprung up in China in the decade that followed.
The Ullenses sought a buyer for their museum in 2016, selling it to Chinese investors in 2017. The institution was then renamed the UCCA Center for Contemporary Art.
In addition to supporting artists, Ullens also helped establish a secondary market for Chinese contemporary art, selling works from the collection over the years, including in 2017, when when he and his wife auctioned off 50 works. One such consignment, Zeng’s The Last Supper, sold for $23.3 million at Sotheby’s Hong Kong in 2013, setting the auction record for contemporary Asian art at the time. The reason they gave: to buy more art.
“Our job as collectors is to promote young artists,” Ullens told the Journal. “I want my art to give me goose bumps. When I get them, I know it’s something good.”
Guy François Edouard Marie Ullens de Schooten Whettnall was born on January 31, 1935, in San Francisco to Baron Jean Ullens and Baroness Marie Thérèse Ullens, who served as diplomats in the US at the time. Both came from noble Belgian families. The Ullens family was ennobled in 1693 by Charles II of Spain, when Belgium was under Spanish rule, according to Politico.
After earning a law degree and an MBA from Stanford University, Guy Ullens joined his family business Raffinerie Tirlemontoise, which focused on beet sugar refinery. He was instrumental in the company’s operations expanding to Asia in the 1980s. In 1989, it sold to a German company.
Shortly afterward, in the early ’90s, Ullens met Myriam when she was looking for investors to expand her pastry business. One prospective investor was Ullens. She recalled experiencing a “coup de foudre,” telling Madame Figaro in 2014, “He is my Pygmalion, the man whom I love and who made me break out of my shell.”
At the time, Guy was married with four children, and Myriam had two children of her own. Guy divorced his first wife, and he and Myriam married in 1999. Around this time, Artal, another Ullens-owned company, acquired Weight Watchers for $735 million. Guy would ultimately retire from the business in 2000, primarily to focus on his collecting and philanthropy. By this point, Myriam had already sold her pastry business, later launching a luxury fashion brand, Masion Ullens, in 2009.
By 2007, ahead of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, they would open the UCCA. The institution’s first exhibition, “’85 New Wave: The Birth of Chinese Contemporary Art,” helped establish a canon for art from this period and relied primarily on the Ullenss holdings.
In 2023, Myriam was murdered outside the couple’s home near Brussels. Her stepson Nicolas Ullens presented himself to the Belgian authorities and confessed to the killing, according to the New York Times. Myriam was found dead in a Volkswagen, with Guy next to her, his legs wounded. Nicolas reportedly fired six shots at the two. A month later, Guy filed a civil suit against his son. Nicolas has denied that the murder was premeditated.
The cause of the slaying was widely reported in the Belgian press to have to do with an inheritance dispute. Nicolas was released under house arrest after spending six months in jail, according to Politico; he is still awaiting a trial that is estimated to start in 2026.
In reflecting on his collecting practices focusing on Chinese contemporary artists, in a 2018 interview with the Asian Art Newspaper, Guy said, “We were the ones who happened to support them and we started to amass paintings. We were driven by sheer enthusiasm!”
