Thomas Sauvin

Bringing together more than 1500 photographs, artist books, objects, installations, and collaborative works, Beijing Silvermine: Archive Anthology explores how vernacular photography has shifted from documentary record into source material for contemporary artistic creation.

ABOUT THE EXHIBITION

Beijing Silvermine：Archive Anthologyexamines more than fifteen years of the Beijing Silvermine project by the artist and archivist Thomas Sauvin (b. 1983, France). Bringing together more than 1500 photographs, books, and installations from collaborative artworks, the exhibition traces the evolution of a project that began with the recovery of film negatives from a recycling plant on the outskirts of Beijing, and which evolved into an artistic practice that has helped shape contemporary artistic approaches to found photography.

Organized by guest curator Holly Roussell, the exhibition opens at Fotografiska Shanghai from June 19 to October 18, 2026, before touring internationally.

Initiated in 2009, Beijing Silvermine is one of the world’s most important archives of vernacular photography. Much of the archive originates from anonymous 35mm film negatives salvaged from a recycling plant on the outskirts of Beijing, where they had been destined for destruction for the extraction of silver nitrate. Rescued and preserved by Sauvin, the Beijing Silvermine project contains more than one million images documenting the period of Reform and Opening up to the early 2000s.

These photographs, shot by everyday people, document the aspirations, social rituals, and material culture of a rapidly changing society, and attest to the unique position of analogue photography in documenting modern life before the transition to digital. Through exhibitions, photobooks, and other forms of artistic reinterpretation, Beijing Silvermine has shared these images and extended their circulation, allowing individual moments that were never destined to be art to acquire broader cultural significance.

Archive Anthology is the largest presentation of Beijing Silvermine to date, unfolding across four sections: The Archive, a monumental installation of more than 1,300 photographs from the salvaged 35mm negatives; The Studio, a reconstruction of Sauvin’s working environment featuring prints, albums, ephemera, books, and archival materials; Until Death Do Us Part, dedicated to the cult photobook exploring wedding rituals and social customs in late twentieth-century China; and Collaborations, presenting projects developed with artists including Lei Lei (CN), Kensuke Koike (JP), Melinda Gibson. (UK), and Klara Källström and Thobias Fäldt (SE).

Both a survey of the project and a reflection of the working methods that have shaped it, this exhibition traces the history of Beijing Silvermine and invites us to look more closely at this distinctive project that has expanded possibilities of working with vernacular photography and redefined the photobook as art.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Born in Paris in 1983, Thomas Sauvin is an archivist, artist, and publisher working between Paris and Beijing. In 2009, he founded Beijing Silvermine, a project centered on found photography and vernacular archives. The collection contains more than one million negatives and images from late twentieth-century China, making it one of the largest private archives of its kind. Sauvin has published over a dozen photobooks and exhibited his work internationally, including at the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, and the Guangdong Museum of Art. His artist books are held in major institutional collections worldwide.

ABOUT THE CURATOR

Holly Roussell (b. 1989) is an American/Swiss curator, researcher, author and museologist, specializing in photography and contemporary art from East Asia. She has organized numerous group and solo exhibitions for museums, biennales, and festivals around the world, including at the Folkwang Museum (DE), MUCEM (Marseille), NGV (Melbourne), and the MMCA—Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul, among others. Currently based in Paris, Roussell served as curator at the UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing from 2021-2026. Prior to this, she worked as an independent curator in China and Switzerland, and spent five years at Photo Élysée in Lausanne. In 2022, Roussell was guest curator of Paris Photo’s “Curiosa” sector for emerging artists.

Recent projects include Slide/Show: Light Images in Chinese Contemporary Art (2023-2026); Feng Li: White Nights in Wonderland (Fotografiska Shanghai/Stockholm/Berlin, 2023–2025); Riar Rizaldi: A Phantom Ride of the Sunda Plate (Centre de la photographie Genève, 2024); the major touring exhibition and publication Civilization: The Way We Live Now (co-curated with William A. Ewing, 2018–present); and Mo Yi: Me in My Landscape (Rencontres d’Arles/UCCA, 2024). In 2026, Roussell will co-author one of the first English language survey books on Korean photography for Thames & Hudson, UK, “Shine Brightly: Korean Photography Since 1957.”