Beijing World Park

The new project by artist and collector Thomas Sauvin is dedicated to the amusement park created in China in 1993 to offer a fictional tour of the world through its miniature monuments. His collection of negatives provides an opportunity to revisit the issue of tourism and our relationship to historical heritage.

Beijing Silvermine is a photographic archive of more than half a million negatives recovered over the past ten years from a recycling facility on the outskirts of Beijing. Since 2009, Thomas Sauvin has been buying these negatives by the kilogram and saving them from the acid tank where they are normally dissolved to extract the precious silver nitrate they contain. 

With Beijing Silvermine , he preserves, edits, and brings to life the memory of a China captured on film. From his early films, which appeared in the mid-1980s, through the rise of digital photography, these images paint an authentic portrait of China since the country opened up to the world.

↘︎ Exhibition Curator: Thomas Sauvin

↘︎ Production: Institut pour la photographie