Benny Bing’s work doesn’t just paint faces; it illuminates entire worlds. His In Full Bloom series — featured on the cover of Beyond Data’s October 2025 issue — is a radiant exploration of Black identity, womanhood, and the spiritual beauty of transformation. Through colour, texture, and composition, Bing’s portraits evoke a universal story of growth: rooted in resilience, nurtured by self-acceptance, and unfurling toward collective liberation.

Photography by Adetona Omokanye

Born in Nigeria and based in Toronto, Bing is a contemporary artist whose visual language bridges continents and cultures. His work pulses with energy and empathy, using bold palettes and expressive brushwork to celebrate the beauty and complexity of Blackness. Each stroke is intentional — a conversation between emotion and structure, vulnerability and power.

In Full Bloom reflects a continuation of Bing’s artistic evolution. The women in his portraits are not muses but mirrors — embodiments of joy, strength, and autonomy. They occupy space with quiet authority, meeting the viewer’s gaze head-on. “Liberation,” Bing explains, “is not an event but a state of being. It’s how you move, how you love, how you see yourself reflected in the world.”

His artistic practice has taken him far beyond the studio. Bing’s work has been showcased in prominent exhibitions, including Enduring Ideals: Rockwell, Roosevelt & the Four Freedoms at the Norman Rockwell Museum in Massachusetts, where his pieces offered a contemporary lens on universal values. His creative collaborations with global brands such as IKEA, Roots Canada, Intuit, Old Navy, Toronto FC, The Daniels Corporation, and Giants of Africa reveal his ability to merge fine art with cultural commentary.

In a visual landscape saturated with repetition, Bing’s work stands apart for its emotional clarity. His portraits resist objectification and instead reclaim beauty as a site of empowerment. The lush greens, deep reds, and soft golds of In Full Bloom evoke both nature’s cycles and the human spirit’s capacity for renewal. They remind us that to be in bloom is not a static state but an act of becoming.

For Beyond Data, this series serves as both image and metaphor — a visual embodiment of this issue’s theme: The Memory of Freedom, The Seasons of Change. In Bing’s hands, freedom is not nostalgia; it’s a colour story, a brushstroke, a promise.