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Jonathan Tang (1997) explores how lines and rhythmic patterns guide our gaze and shape Dutch culture and the living environment. His background in architecture informs his fascination with perspective. In his recent work, Tang seeks to make viewers aware of the disciplined landscape in which we live – a landscape in which control and traces of institutional violence are omnipresent.
In the series Perspective Machine (2025–ongoing), the polder landscape plays a central role. Tang produces visual reports of the objects he encounters in this environment, photographing them at the exact locations where archive photographs were taken for Rijkswaterstaat between 1970 and 1980. These new images correspond with the original documentation held in the image archive of the Dutch Ministry of Infrastructure and Water Management, thereby foregrounding the layered nature of the Dutch landscape. In the polder, Tang photographed the black-tailed godwit: the orange hue of its bill returns as orange tape in his work. In the Noord-Kethelpolder near Schiedam – an area home to these breeding meadow birds – he writes and photographs in order to bring the abstract, human-constructed dominance of agriculture to the fore in a visual report. Tang enlarges the analogue archival documentation and subsequently blurs the landscape using frosted glass. By blurring the image and adding coloured tape lines to the foreground, he dissects the structures of the familiar Dutch landscape and presents them anew.
Written by: Kelly-ann van Steveninck