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 Anthology examines more than fifteen years of the Beijing Silvermine project by artist and archivist Thomas Sauvin. Bringing together more than 1500 photographs, artist books, objects, installations, and collaborative works, the exhibition explores how vernacular photography has shifted from documentary record into source material for contemporary artistic creation.

Organized by guest curator Holly Roussell, the exhibition opens at Fotografiska Shanghai from June 19 to October 18, 2026, before touring internationally. Blurring the boundaries between archive and artwork, the Beijing Silvermine project reflects on photography’s evolving role within modern society, inviting audiences to consider how images shape memory, identity, and collective experience across generations.

Initiated in 2009, Beijing Silvermine has become one of the world’s most important archives of vernacular photography documenting China’s Reform and Opening Up period and the rapid transformations that followed through the early 2000s. Salvaged primarily from a recycling plant on the outskirts of Beijing, the archive now contains more than one million negatives, along with hundreds of prints, albums, and color transparencies.

These anonymous images, adopted and conserved by Sauvin, were taken by ordinary people photographing family life, travel, and leisure, giving us a unique and unparalleled perspective on daily life during this pivotal period of modernization, as well as on vernacular image-making practices throughout the decades in which film photography remained embedded in everyday life before the transition to digital.

The exhibition unfolds across four sections: The Archive, a monumental installation of more than 1,300 photographs; The Studio, a reconstruction of Sauvin’s working environment featuring albums, ephemera, artist books, and archival materials; Until Death Do Us Part, dedicated to Sauvin’s cult photobook exploring wedding rituals and social customs in late twentieth-century China; and Collaborations, presenting projects developed with artists including Lei Lei, Kensuke Koike, Miranda Gibson, and Klara Källström & Thobias Fäldt. Returning again and again to the same body of images across books, installations, and collaborations, Sauvin engages with the archive not as a fixed historical record, but as a living anthology continually capable of producing new meanings, forms, and perspectives.

Beijing Silvermine creates a powerful emotional encounter with images that were never originally intended as art. It reminds us that ordinary photographs can become extraordinary carriers of identity, community, and shared experience. The exhibition offers a deeper look at a distinctive vernacular photography project that has helped redefine both the possibilities of working with found photography and 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.”