Thomas Sauvin

Recycled

Thomas Sauvin, Lei Lei

Lei Lei

An exhaustively created moving image mural of Beijing and her inhabitants, painstakingly extracted from an archive of half a million 35mm negatives.

Hand Colored no.2

Thomas Sauvin, Lei Lei

In 2013, Lei Lei and Thomas Sauvin collected numbers of black-and-white photos from Chinese flea markets and imagined that all of them belonged to one fictional Chinese person. Through rendering, collage, and a cyclical process of hand coloring, scanning, and printing, connections among the photos were created.

Beijing Silvermine

Emiland Guillerme

Thomas Sauvin

A documentary about the French collector and artist Thomas Sauvin, who since 2009 has salvaged discarded negatives from a recycling plant on the edge of Beijing, negatives that were destined to destruction. His Beijing Silvermine archive, one of the largest archival projects in China, now encompasses over 850,000 anonymous photographs spanning the period from 1985 to 2005.