Taedong Lee – Eetu Sihvonen
Andrea Festa Fine Art is pleased to present Escapism, a two-person exhibition featuring new works by Taedong Lee and Eetu Sihvonen. This exhibition invites visitors into immersive emotional and symbolic terrains, offering space for reflection, withdrawal, and transformation through art.
In Escapism, both artists approach the idea of retreat—not as avoidance, but as an act of engagement with inner worlds shaped by memory, desire, and myth. Through differing but complementary practices, Lee and Sihvonen offer viewers alternative realities that mirror psychological and spiritual truths.
Taedong Lee works through painting, starting from direct sensory experiences—sketches, sounds, photographs, and reflections gathered from specific landscapes. These materials become layered emotional archives that evolve into dreamlike scenes, or what the artist calls “phantom places.” They are semi-fictional, emotionally charged landscapes, shaped as much by memory and media as by the places themselves. "The main point," Lee states, "is the process of combining the current new self influenced by various media in a new space created from the past.”
In contrast, Eetu Sihvonen turns to medieval allegory and symbolism to construct enigmatic wood-and-resin sculptures. Drawing inspiration from Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s The Land of Cockaigne (1567), his recurring motif of a two-legged egg functions as a modern-day talisman—at once humorous and haunting. The figure represents themes of gluttony, lost potential, and human curiosity as it attempts escape from its own fate, echoing the fragile balance between transformation and entrapment in contemporary life.
Together, Lee’s atmospheric paintings and Sihvonen’s mythic forms engage in a shared language of introspection. Their works act as portals—offering temporary refuge from external realities and encouraging viewers to explore internal dimensions shaped by time, longing, and imagination.
