Beijing Silvermine: Archive Anthology

From June 19, 2026, Fotografiska Shanghai is honored to present Beijing Silvermine: Archive Anthology. The exhibition examines more than fifteen years of the Beijing Silvermine project by artist and archivist Thomas Sauvin. Organized by guest curator Holly Roussell, the exhibition brings together more than 1,500 photographs, artist books, objects, installations, and collaborative works, exploring how vernacular photography has shifted from documentary record into source material for contemporary artistic creation.

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 by Sauvin 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.

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. And this exhibition endeavors to give a deeper look at this distinctive vernacular photographic projects, which helped redefine both the possibilities of working with found photography and the photobook as art.