International collection

Sandra Kantanen graduated from the University of Art and Design (the Helsinki School), which led her spend a year in China where she explored the theme of nature through a peculiar approach, which combines a typically Finnish attitude towards the subject with the tradition of Chinese landscape painting. Since then, Kantanen has focused on the creation of an idyllic world through works that hint at Oriental atmospheres without belonging to any particular place or time. The idealised character of these landscapes is underlined by the specific technique developed by the artists, which makes the most of the properties of digital pigment printing to achieve an original hybrid of photography and painting. Here, photography is no longer a means of bearing witness to a given reality; rather, it provides the basis for experimentally depicting an untainted, paradisiacal natural world, which may have existed in a far-off past, or perhaps, is only accessible through the imagination.