"Untitled (Sakura 2)"

pigmentbased inkjet print, mounted on aluminium

Sandra Kantanen became interested in traditional Chinese landscape painting while still a student in Helsinki. On her first trip to China she was cofronted by the contradiction between the idealized landscapes represented in China's long history of landscape painting and the reality of modern China, whose landscape has been drastically altered by unchecked economical development and pollution. Sandra Katanen comes from a country where the beauty of nature lies in the notion of wilderness, untouched and natural. In China her idea of natural beauty was confronted with a culture where the ideal of beauty in nature lies in the arrangement of nature by the human hand, in the notion of "gardening."
At the outset of her sojourn, influenced by traditional Chinese landscape painting. Sandra Kantanen photographed the holy mountains depicted by the ancient Chinese masters. However, she soon became dissatisfied with this approach and felt compelled to create her own "mindscapes," a mixture of personal idealistic landscapes and of the Chinese painting tradition.
Lately Sandra Kantanern has distanced herself from her early practice and is investigating alternate methods of perception. In her photographs she continues to use nature and the landscape as her primary source of inspiration but instead of presernting the viewer with an idealized single view of any given landscape, the artist declines her subject over and over again, thus inviting the viewer to explore it in multiple, shifting ways.
(from: The Helsinki School, Vol. 4, A Female View, 2011)