Architecture Begins as an Image

Long before a single line is drawn in CAD, a building exists as an image — an idea about the people who will inhabit it and the environment that will host it. Materials, budgets and technical constraints arrive much later, and sometimes distort the thing that was first imagined.

That observation sits at the heart of ANONYMOUS, the exhibition of digital works by French artist François Bancon now showing as part of KLAF 2026, the Kuala Lumpur Architecture Festival organised by Pertubuhan Akitek Malaysia under the theme Future Culture. As Official Industry Sponsor of KLAF 2026, DPI Technology printed every piece on the gallery walls.

It is an unusually direct invitation to the architects, designers and engineers in the KLAF audience: to look at the built environment the way an image-maker does, and to ask what — and who — a space is actually for.

François Bancon: From Concept Cars to the Digital Brush

François Bancon has straddled the creative and the industrial for more than fifty years. Born in France in 1951, he studied mathematics, history of art and philosophy in Paris, was deeply engaged in the student social movements of the 1970s, and worked as a photographer, radio DJ and television producer at Capital-TV before — in his own telling, inadvertently — entering the automotive industry.

He spent 35 years there. Beginning his career with Renault in Paris, he relocated to Tokyo in the late 1990s to join the resurrection of the then-failing Nissan Motor Company under the Renault–Nissan Alliance. As Head of Nissan Exploratory, he became the company's chief futurist, leading the team responsible for reimagining the future of mobility and designing the concept cars unveiled at motor shows.

Tokyo is also where he swapped the paintbrush for the “digital brush” — a camera and a laptop. That reincarnation was driven by practicality as much as philosophy: the nomadic life of an automotive executive meant he needed to be able to create anywhere, at any time. His body of digital work now spans more than 25 years of travel around the globe.

Bancon has spent the last two decades in Asia — Japan, Hong Kong, China and now Malaysia, where he adds a further chapter aimed at using art as a facilitative medium for humanity to journey towards awareness and social citizenship.

His work deliberately resists easy admiration. He is not chasing the universally accepted norms of aesthetics, but an intellectually consistent body of work, which is why he creates in series: each image has a purpose only fully visible against the whole. It is art that does not seek to be loved, but that asks the viewer to seek the “truths in beauty” with the mind as much as the eye.

Inside ANONYMOUS

The show's full title is ANONYMOUS [precarious manifesto for architects], and the bracketed half is not decoration — it names the audience Bancon is arguing with. It is an homage to the visionary architects who tell stories of humanity, starting with the image. Bancon's premise is that architecture and images are both fictions, with humanity as the central character — and that an architect, like an artist, works with the world and its people as essential material. That shared raw material is what makes the two disciplines so closely connected and so interdependent.

The show comprises five themed series, built to overlap and interlock so that the visitor's experience accumulates rather than resolves. The images are presented as questions, not answers.

In an era of algorithmic narcissism — where every face is a brand and every emotion is currency — these images resist. No captions. No staging. Only people with their backs turned, faces withheld, bodies absorbed by shadow or crowd. Anonymity as shelter. Anonymity as density. Anonymity as the right to remain free. Anonymity as an act of resistance.

The exhibition carries 4 LAM CPD points for registered architects — worth knowing if you have points still to log this year. Check with UR-MU on how to claim them when you visit.

Whilst the show is entitled Anonymous, Bancon notes it could just as easily have been named Humanity. You can see the artist's own preview of the exhibition on his Instagram.

Printing the Walls: Why HP Latex 730W

A gallery is one of the least forgiving environments in large-format printing. Visitors stand centimetres from the surface, spend an hour or more in an enclosed room, and — in a show built on series — will compare one panel directly against the next. Every artwork in ANONYMOUS was produced on DPI Technology's HP Latex 730W, and each of those pressures maps to a specific reason why.

It is the same principle that governs everything DPI Technology does on the CAD side of the business: the output is only as trustworthy as the device that produced it. Whether that output is a gallery wall or a set of tender drawings from an HP DesignJet XL 3800, the standard does not change.

Seen Through Their Eyes

The exhibition has been documented by UR-MU and The Project Room since opening night. Here is ANONYMOUS as their audiences have seen it.