Bence Bakonyi is a photographer from Hungary. His work captivates with its purity of colour and precise, restrained detail. In this article we see, through his eyes, a strikingly empty Chinese city in the series "Segue".
Bence Bakonyi was born in 1991 in the Hungarian town of Keszthely, on the shores of Lake Balaton. He began teaching himself photography at school and later enrolled at the Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design in Budapest. His teachers were Gábor Arion Kudász and Mátyás Misetics, and their influence can be felt throughout Bakonyi's work.
Despite being just twenty-five, Bence Bakonyi has already taken part in numerous exhibitions and is represented by galleries around the world. He works with galleries in Hong Kong, Paris, Sweden and Budapest. His photographs have been included in group shows at the Ludwig Museum in Cologne, the Műcsarnok exhibition hall in Budapest, and the Nicholas Metivier Gallery in Toronto. Bakonyi has also exhibited solo at the Artify gallery in Hong Kong and the Xuhui Art Museum in Shanghai. His work has been featured in selections by The Guardian, Wired, Blink, Étapes Magazine and The Red List.
On Bakonyi's website — bencebakonyi.com — his work is described as follows: "Bence Bakoni's photographic works are symbols of freedom, airiness and transformation. Beneath their contemporary and youthful aesthetic lie deeper layers of interpretation. The generous spaces of his photographs and their ability to bridge reality and fantasy draw the viewer away from the troubles of everyday life and direct the mind towards far more universal and worthwhile questions of human existence."
During his travels through China in 2013–2014, Bakoni was searching for his place in the world. Unable to speak Chinese and finding communication with locals difficult, Bence Bakoni chose to step back from photographing people and turn his lens on the world around him. The series presented here, Segue, traces the arc of Bakoni's journey as he gradually moved from the countryside into the man-made world. His camera captured the remarkable duality of Chinese cities: the close proximity of towering new-build apartment blocks and slums awaiting demolition.
If Bence Bakoni's work has moved you, our website also gives you the opportunity to explore another of his series, Cognition.
