Since 2009, Thomas Sauvin has collected hundreds of thousands of photographs taken in China’s Beijing area from the mid-1980s onwards. The result, wrote Charlotte Jansen in Elephant Issue 30, is “a previously unseen social history of China—by and of the people”. During the initial archiving process, Sauvin began noticing recurring themes among the images, thereafter compiling them into series. One of these, Until Death Do Us Part, documents the “very unusual modern Chinese tradition” of smoking at weddings—and this remarkable picture, the archivist told Jansen, was the catalyst: “It all started with this one photo of a guy, very well dressed, standing next to his new wife [with] a huge wedding bong: a bottle of coke filled with cigarettes.”
