ARCHIVES

Foreword

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The Liu Shiming Art Foundation presents Archives, an exhibition in which photographs and sculptures enter into dialogue to offer a renewed perspective on everyday life. The attention given to the ordinary and the unseen invites us to rediscover a form of beauty  that resides in simplicity and in what surrounds us each day. The everyday becomes a  subject for reflection, and the most fleeting moments are transformed into lasting testimonies of a collective memory. 

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The prints by Thomas Sauvin come from his extensive project Beijing Silvermine, through which he recovered and preserved negatives abandoned in a recycling factory in Beijing. Drawn from a body of hundreds of thousands of images produced by amateurs between 1985 and 2005, these photographs form a unique corpus through which to observe the social, aesthetic, and cultural transformations of contemporary China. These works are handmade C-type silver prints, an artisanal process that grants  each image a singular presence. Printing becomes an act of re creation: light, contrast, and the texture of the paper bring almost forgotten moments back to life, offering them a  renewed materiality and a timeless duration. Through street scenes, family portraits, celebrations, and everyday objects, Thomas Sauvin brings to light an emerging  collective memory, revealing how a society in transition represents itself. His gesture is  not that of a simple archivist. He proposes a sensitive and analytical perspective on  vernacular culture, uncovering within the banal a documentary, emotional, and historical depth. 

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It is within this shared attention to the everyday that the works of Liu Shiming meet and  extend Thomas Sauvin’s approach. Where the photographs reveal the intimacy of an era, Liu Shiming’s works offer an artistic resonance that translates these gestures and  attitudes into a more timeless dimension. One collects, the other interprets. One reveals  the living diversity of existences, the other explores their essential forms. Together, their works illuminate different modes of constructing memory: the instantaneous image and  the crafted object, the archive and the act of transfiguration. 

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Liu Shiming is likewise interested in simple gestures and modest figures, children, animals, workers, which he approaches for their expressive power rather than for formal exactitude. His works, animated by a dense presence, bear witness to a sustained reflection on popular forms and on the ordinary gestures that run through daily life. They invite the viewer to recognize the sensitivity inherent in these discreet scenes and to perceive their continuity and human depth. 

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Where photography captures a moment and fixes it in time, sculpture and drawing materialize these same gestures within the three dimensionality of the present. Through the modeling of bronze or ceramic, and at times through the spontaneity of drawing, Liu Shiming gives form to vernacular attitudes that find a natural echo in the images of Thomas Sauvin. This encounter creates a space of circulation between mediums, where photographed and sculpted forms seem to respond to one another, an unintentional mimetic relationship between prints and sculptures. Certain gestures and postures identified on film appear to re emerge in volume, as if they belonged to a shared grammar inscribed in the collective unconscious. This phenomenon reveals the  persistence of human behaviors, regardless of their context of capture or creation. 

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This parallel establishes a subtle tension between chance and intention, between documentary observation and artistic interpretation. It offers the viewer a sensory experience in which attitudes find their resonance in sculptural presentation. Archives thus becomes a celebration of everyday life, a tribute to the traces we leave behind and to those we choose to preserve. The exhibition reaffirms the value of the gaze directed toward the ordinary and invites us to rediscover a beauty that unfolds in the simplicity of the real. 

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Maëlle Ebelle

Gallery Director

December 2025

About the Artists​

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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.

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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.

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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.

 

Liu Shiming (1926–2010) was a pioneering figure in Chinese sculpture. A graduate of the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, Liu’s work blends traditional Chinese aesthetics with modernist influences. He is celebrated for his intimate portrayals of rural life and his distinctive "Chinese Method," which emphasizes narrative and cultural grounding. His works are housed in institutions across Asia, North America, and Europe. In 2018, the Liu Shiming Sculpture Museum was established at CAFA.