Name: Artist Talk: Conversation with Thomas Sauvin
Start: 2026-02-24T17:00:00-05:00
End: 2026-02-24T20:00:00-05:00
Location: Liu Shiming Art Foundation

Artist Talk: Conversation with Thomas Sauvin

On the occasion of the opening of his exhibition Archives at Liu Shiming Art Gallery on February 24.
About this Event

Speakers

Thomas Sauvin (artist) and Maëlle Ebelle (gallery director)

Date

Tuesday, February 24, 2026

Time

5:00 pm to 8:00 pm

Location

Liu Shiming Art Gallery

About
On the occasion of the opening of his exhibition Archives at Liu Shiming Art Gallery on February 24, Thomas Sauvin will take part in a conversation with Maëlle Ebelle, the gallery’s director. The discussion will focus on his work and the selection of photographs from the Beijing Silvermine project featured in the exhibition, in dialogue with Liu Shiming’s sculptures. We will explore the aesthetics of their works, their resonances and mimetic qualities, as well as Thomas Sauvin’s approach to this exceptional project.

Thomas Sauvin (France, 1983) is a Paris- and Beijing-based artist. Since 2009, he has developed Beijing Silvermine, a large-scale archival project born from the rescue of hundreds of thousands of color negatives that were bound for destruction in a recycling plant on the outskirts of Beijing. Now comprising more than one million anonymous photographs produced between 1985 and 2005, the archive offers an unprecedented record of vernacular photography in China at the end of the twentieth century. Constantly expanding, it functions as a platform for artistic, historical, and cross-cultural inquiry, while contributing to a broader reflection on collective memory.

Sauvin’s work has been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, and the Guangdong Museum of Art, among other venues.

Over the past decade, he has published fifteen photobooks with publishers including the Archive of Modern Conflict (UK), Jiazazhi (China), Skinnerboox (Italy), The(M) Editions (France), and VOID (Greece), alongside multiple self-published artist books. His publications are held in the collections of the MET, the Tate, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Bibliothèque nationale de France, and the Centre Pompidou.