[1] He was born in Novorossiysk, on the Black Sea, and in the early 1980s moved to Leningrad, where he met and became friends with leaders of the art scene there, such as the painter Timur Novikov and musician Boris Grebenshchikov.
His 1993 project "Krimania" took the form of an initial performance, which involved the artist spending three weeks in a mental institution in Simferopol, Crimea, at the end of which he staged an exhibition for the patients and staff of the hospital.
The second part of the project was a major exhibition at the Museum of Applied Arts in Vienna (MAK), entitled "Krimania: Icons, Monuments, Mazáfaka."
In August 2013, a group of artists from St. Petersburg (Yevgeniy Kozlov, Oleg Maslov, Inal Savchenkov, Oleg Zaika) filed lawsuits against Bugaev, accusing him of illegal possession of 25 of their works from the late 1980s.
The Last Generation of the Leningrad Avant-Garde", organized by Sergei Bugaev in May and June 2013 at the state-owned Research Museum of the Russian Academy of Arts, St.