Negative archive/archive of negatives: mining the impenetrable past in Chinese contemporary photography

How do we understand an archive of historical photographs that makes its content hardly legible? This paper explores this questions via two case studies, namely

Negatives

(2015) and 17 18 19 (2019). In 2015, Chinese photographer Yong Xu released a daring photobook titled Negatives, featuring photographs that he took in the 1989 Tiananmen student movement and only dug out from his archive almost three decades later. Strikingly, the artist decides to display the film negatives in their original form – reversed from left to right, from light to dark, and colors inverted to their opposite hue. Four years later, in a similar approach, French collector and artist Thomas Sauvin published a photobook titled 17 18 19, showcasing salvaged negatives from his archive that are anonymous mugshots of evidence taken in a detention center in Beijing between 1991 and 1993. This paper seeks to grasp the role of film negatives as an aesthetic device in archival practices and their political valence in negotiating with a turbulent past. Attending to materiality and affective engagement, I consider how the negatives invite the viewer to either imagine their appearance as a historical photograph in positive or to perform with digital technology for their resuscitation, both of which are ultimately met with disappointment. I argue that negatives reveal a paradoxical status of being simultaneously testimony to history and to the impenetrability of history. Ultimately, this paper aims to comprehend how film negatives could redefine the notion of authenticity and historical truth in a historical archive.