Beijing Silvermine is a unique photographic portrait of the Chinese capital and the life of its inhabitants in the decades following the Cultural Revolution.

Since 2009 Beijing-based collector Thomas Sauvin has amassed, edited and archived more than half a million photographic negatives destined for destruction in a recycling plant on the edge of the city. It was here that Sauvin encountered a man by the name of Xiao Ma who stockpiles negatives, x-rays, compact discs and other detritus to melt down and filter for their silver nitrate content intended to be sold to laboratories. Recognising a rare chance to rescue abandoned memories, Sauvin struck up a deal to buy these photographic negatives by the kilo. This ‘silvermine’ of anonymous subjects and vernacular photography styles covers a period of roughly 20 years – from 1985, when affordable consumer film first came into widespread use in China, to 2005 when digital photography encouraged the mass disposal and willful neglect of film.

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Video: Beijing Silvermine – Thomas Sauvin from Emiland Guillerme on Vimeo.

In his phenomenal accumulation of photographs Thomas Sauvin allows us to witness the intimate and public lives of ordinary Chinese people during a period of immense social change. These material images reveal the mundane and extraordinary moments in everyday life that have been rescued from oblivion. More than just a glimpse into the lives of people that might otherwise have been invisible participants in an impersonal collective history, the subject of Beijing Silvermine is as much the wondrous, imperfect and perishable qualities of film photography itself – its delayed surprises between the split-second of exposure and the alchemical magic of development.

Beijing Silvermine at 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art presents a selection of photographs from this extraordinary archive curated by Thomas Sauvin that explore universal themes of love, leisure, birth, youth, happiness and the subtle changes – both in domestic settings and in the wider public realm – that the economic opening to the West brought into ordinary Chinese people’s lives. Also presented are two mesmerising video animations, produced by Beijing-based animator Lei Lei in collaboration with Sauvin, that reveal the surreal imagescape and stupendous depth of the Silvermine.

Beijing Silvermine opens at 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art on Saturday 11 January 2014, 2–4pm to be officially opened by Councillor Robert Kok of the City of Sydney, with special guest speaker Linda Jaivin, novelist, writer, translator and Visiting Fellow, Australian National University.

MEDIA COVERAGE

Steve Dow, Exhibition captures life from negative past, Sydney Morning Herald, 17 January 2014.

SBS Radio – Chinese (Mandarin), Listen to the radio podcast online.

Nicholas Forrest, 10 Must-See Exhibitions in Australia in 2014, Artinfo, 30 December 2013.

Luise Guest, Objet Trouve Chinois, The Art Life, 17 January 2014.

Art Guide

Broadsheet

Concrete Playground 

TimeOut Sydney