Sandra Kantanen (1974, Helsinki) is known for landscapes that balance between memory and imagination, evoking the idyll of traditional Chinese and Japanese worlds. This dialogue between old and new has its roots in her time in China: as she explains, she originally went there in 2000 as an exchange student to complete part of her master’s degree in photography. While studying Chinese landscape painting at the Central Academy of Art in Beijing, she became fascinated by the idea of understanding their way of looking at nature. What began as an academic experiment grew into a personal obsession: how could artists, for centuries, not merely depict nature, but sublimate it into an ideal image?

Her photographs reveal a natural world in constant metamorphosis. Trained at the Aalto University School of Arts, Design and Architecture in Helsinki and later in Beijing, she developed a visual language that explores the threshold between photography and painting – and it is precisely in this space that her work finds its magic.

MEADOWS, 2023

The Meadows series explores the border between photography and painting. Wildflowers in forgotten rural and urban spaces are captured and digitally reworked with pixelated splashes and painterly gestures.

Each work portrays a different patch of meadow – small green enclaves breaking through the cracks of concrete and brick. Untouched by people, these sites thrive with biodiversity, observed only by insects, bees, and the artist’s lens.

Layered and abstracted, the images vibrate with colour and light, evoking landscapes that shimmer in the summer air.

NEW LANDSCAPES, 2022-2023

The landscapes of Kantanen seem at odds with our time. Her photographs evoke the idylls of traditional Chinese and Japanese worlds, where the tension between past and present becomes a central theme.

Her work embraces the utopian dream of mountains and water, suspending time in an imagined landscape centuries removed from modernity. The pared-back clarity of her images invites contemplation of trees, blossoms, peaks and mirrored waters.

Yet beneath the calm surface lies a subtle friction, as the contemporary gaze, unaccustomed to stillness, senses unease. While her practice appears to challenge the speed and theories of today, it is grounded in modern methods.
Photography and paint merge as she works with light itself, balancing harmony and disruption.
The serene allure of her images draws the viewer towards reflection, while flashes of colour and layered techniques suggest that imperfection belongs not only to human perception, but to nature itself, and even to its most idealised visions.