Mind's Eye

Adrian Bondy

May 6 – June 29, 2025

opening : Tuesday May 6

in presence of the artist

6pm – 10pm

CHINE 1983-2017

These images were made over the course of five academic visits to China spanning thirty-five years, although the majority date from the eighties. They reflect implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, the immense changes in Chinese society over this period. In 1983, one could not go anywhere unless accompaned by a guide or official. Communication in English was rather difficult. Every other day, one was taken on visits to factories and their day-care facilities, to spacious parks, to sites such as the Great Wall, Tienanmen Square, the Forbidden City, the Winter Palace. Beijing boasted wide streets but only the rare, official car to take advantage of them. Bicycles dominated, long, wide streams of them, a chorus of dingling bells. People lived in close proximity, either in small compact neighbourhoods, constantly surveyed, or in narrow alleys (hutongs). Mugs of tea, topped up every so often, were ubiquitous at meetings, conference talks, factory visits. As an invited guest, one travelled in comfort, generally by train or chauffeured car. At restaurants, even at breakfast, one was seated in a separate room from one’s guide or driver, a room reserved for foreigners and dignitaries.

Changes were already clearly visible in 1989. For instance, a Nanjing hutong I had visited in 1983 had been demolished and a new housing complex was under construction. By 2010, apartment blocks, frequently unsold and unoccupied, were shooting up everywhere like mushrooms, heralding the construction crisis of 2021. In Shanghai, a newly constructed railway station, with its gigantic hall and long line of security gates, resembled an airport terminal. It took the best part of an hour to travel by coach on the spaghetti of elevated freeways from the main campus of East China Normal University to its new satellite campus, also in Shanghai. (In 1989, I had cycled with ease, in the company of a group of foreign teachers, the 7km or so from the campus to the Shanghai Yue Opera House.) In 2017, the island resort of Sanya boasted spectacular tower blocks, sandy beaches, Chinese and Russian millionaires, and a 108 metre-tall bronze statue of the buddhist goddess of mercy Guanyin, erected on an artificial island.

ADRIAN BONDY

Born in London, Adrian Bondy moved to Canada in 1968 to take up a university post in mathematics. During his years of teaching and research, he pursued his passion for photography and took part in annual competitions organised by art museums, as well as the Ilford International Black and White Competition. He held several exhibitions, including one at the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery.

In 1994 he was appointed to a post at Lyon 1. Since retiring in 2009, he has devoted most of his time to photography. In 2010, he founded the non-profit organisation Mind’s Eye, which aims to explore conceptual links between mathematics and photography. In collaboration with Roland Assous, he is producing a series of booklets on various mathematical themes, linking these themes to photographs. The first two issues, on Numbers and Photography, and Sets and Photography, were published by Mind’s Eye in 2018 and 2019. In 2012, he opened the Mind’s Eye gallery, dedicated to photography. In addition to running the gallery, he has shown his own work in solo exhibitions at the Niépce Gallery in Tokyo and at Mind’s Eye. More recently, during annual visits to Cuba, notably to the city of Camagüey, his work focused on the daily lives of Cubans. In 2019, at the Larios gallery in Camagüey, he presented the exhibition Cafés de Paris, an expanded version of which was held at Mind’s Eye in 2022. Other themes explored include The English, Venice, Blowups and Evictions, all subjects of self-published books.

All photographs © Adrian Bondy