Thomas Sauvin

Kensuke Koike and Thomas Sauvin combined their creative strengths to produce their No More No Less series. This project stems from an album of black and white headshots made by an anonymous Shanghai University photography student in the 1980s. Thomas Sauvin discovered these photographs and called on Kensuke Koike’s vivid imagination to give them new life. They decided to transform these relics from the past abiding by one strict rule: Nothing was to be removed and nothing added. The Japanese artist used his scalpel and adhesive tape to slice up, dismantle and rearrange each portrait in a surprising psychedelic collage. His utmost precision enabled him to create a new image that consists entirely of itself. Kensuke Koike and Thomas Sauvin use their skill and sense of humour to reinvent images that were destined to be forgotten. Together, they transform something commonplace into something to dream about.

Thomas Sauvin and Lei Lei (China, 1985) collected, colorized, manipulated and animated anonymous black and white snapshots found at Chinese flea markets. In the process, sometimes repeated over a hundred times, they linked these photographs together and imagined that they might belong to the same person, thus revealing the infinite narrative potential of an image removed from its original context. Comprising nearly 1200 photographs, the Hand-Colored Photography installation shows the meticulous and titanic work the duo undertook to create, from scratch, the imaginary life of a Chinese citizen.

For nearly a decade, Thomas Sauvin collected negatives that he bought in bulk from a silver nitrate recycling plant north of Beijing. He then digitized and classified them by topic. This huge archive of over half a million anonymous snapshots delivers an authentic and quirky portrait of China as it was opening up to leisure society in the wake of the Cultural Revolution. The Biennale Images Vevey presented a selection of these images near Lake Geneva, showing Chinese people getting a taste of the fun of amusement parks and swimming. These images were also reproduced on bath towels specifically for the Biennale, also displayed on the lakeside.