Gene Bond
BOOKS
Gene Bond (Evgeny Bondarenko, b. 1986) is an urban sketch artist, muralist, and illustrator based in Taoyuan, Taiwan. Born and raised near a Soviet military airfield in Bataisk (USSR, now Russia), Bond has spent over two decades developing a deeply personal artistic language that blends observational precision with narrative depth. Since 2024, he is a citizen of Taiwan.
Known for his prolific on-location drawings of urban environments, Bond has sketched more than 30 cities across Asia and Europe—including Shanghai, Paris, Hanoi, Hong Kong, and multiple regions in Taiwan—building a body of work that captures both the architecture and the emotional essence of place. His series-based approach brings together the immediacy of field sketching with the deliberate structure of illustrated storytelling.
Bond’s sketchbooks have been published internationally, including Shanghai Zen, Russia & France Sketchbooks, Taiwan Sketchbooks, 36 Views to Taipei 101, and Daxi: Capturing the Essence of Taiwan. His work has been exhibited in museums, galleries, universities, and festivals in Taiwan, China, Russia, Turkey, and Hong Kong. Clients and collaborators include the Shanghai Urban Planning Museum, Fubon Art Museum, and Taiwan’s Ministry of Culture.
In addition to his urban sketches, Gene Bond creates large-scale murals using acrylic paints and markers. These murals—painted in Hong Kong, Taiwanese schools and parks, and most notably for the Yunlin Storyhouse—serve as immersive visual narratives that transcend the limitations of traditional sketching. Unlike his location-based sketches that capture specific moments, Bond’s murals combine multiple local scenes into a broader emotional and spatial experience, turning walls into open windows of cultural memory.
A former artist-in-residence at the Swatch Art Peace Hotel (Shanghai), Bond is also active as an educator. He runs the YouTube channel “Gene Bond Art,” which focuses on advanced perspective drawing and currently has over 5,500 subscribers. He is writing an in-depth book on how to draw motorcycles in perspective and is preparing to launch original comic book projects that merge his lifelong passion for sequential art with his trained draftsmanship.
Bond’s artistic roots trace back to a childhood fascination with comics, this early discovery of comics as portals to alternate realities continues to shape his visual storytelling today. Deeply influenced by Japanese manga, American comics, and Russian realist painters, Gene Bond’s work bridges cultural vocabularies while remaining grounded in direct observation, technical excellence, and emotional authenticity.
Now fully based in Taiwan, Gene Bond continues to expand his visual practice across Asia through travel, exhibitions, and publications. His work represents a synthesis of the hand-drawn and the lived, of memory and movement—committed to capturing life as it unfolds, one page, one wall, and one city at a time.
