In the early nineties, due to the easier conditions for obtaining a visa in Hungary, the population of Chinese people grew from almost zero to about 27,000 in just a few years. The project of Krisztina Szalay was set in the largest Chinese market in Budapest, which became the center of the Hungarian Chinese community. Szalay has sneaked in to document hidden territories of the market where it is not permitted to take photos and made connections with people working there so that she was not mistaken for a tax controller. Szalay observed aspects of the life of the nationalities congregated here and the operation of the market. The industrial building, located in the flagrant 8th district of Budapest, is surrounded by a classical Eastern European milieu, while its Chinese spirit is becoming more and more significant. This contrast gives a special character to the photos: it feels like they have been taken in a multicultural city somewhere in the United States, where the coexistence of different nations is a more familiar phenomenon. Isolation and the attempts of assimilation are both present in the photos. The small fragments of the everyday life of Chinese people living in Budapest invite us to become familiar with a culture that has slowly infiltrated in the last 25 years. The images were bound together in a photo book entitled Made in China, a visual diary with an anthropological point of view. The publication won the young talent award of the Art Market Budapest in 2017.
"There was an assembled stack there, though. A long, large stack. Wheat and potatoes froze there. It was mounted with a thick, who knows, maybe half or one meter thick frozen layer outside under which the wheat and potatoes were conserved. They went there to steal whenever they could. They made a hole, but as a Russian was walking about, they could not really steal.", from the series Etwas zu essen?, 2013
"To us it was strange that we had domestic bread, but it was already mouldy. The natives came up to the barbed wire and brought green apples, and as far as I remember, they threw them in to us and we gave them this mouldy bread for the apples. They were so thrilled, but we thought, oh God, we ended up here. Do these natives give us apples for this bread?" , from the series Etwas zu essen?, 2013
Detail from the book Made in China, 2017
Detail from the book Made in China, 2017