COMFORTABLE COLLECTIVE
The Comfortable Collective, initiated by the artist Jin Shan in 2008, is a project-based group with varying artists participating in each incarnation. A humorous approach and a propensity to bring social, cultural and economic themes down to a more intimate dimension are common to the group’s manifestations. For their first project Comfortable subtly critiqued the prevalent art market fervor. They rented an apartment in Shanghai altered it with artworks, and thus reframed audience expectations of where art is located and what it is. For its second iteration, Comfortable participated in the X Baltica Triennial in Vilnius, Lithuania. For one month the collective inhabited a local home creating works that investigated Lithuania’s fraught relationship with its communist past. In 2010, the Van Abbe Museum and Art Hub Asia invited Comfortable to interact with works from their collection in the exhibition ‘Double Infinity’. The collective came up with several humorous and revealing renditions of the Van Abbe’s prestigious collection.
The fourth manifestation of Comfortable is composed of artists: Jin Shan, Tang Dixin, Gao Mingyan, Maya Kramer and Girolamo Marri. In the Shanghai Gallery of Art Project Space they will stage their own version of an art auction. In recent years the contemporary art market has undergone a considerable structural readjustment as auction houses have risen in power to match those of galleries and private dealers. This has subsequently effected the perception and production of art. By re-creating this inherently dramatic event in a playful way, Comfortable tries to expose the mechanisms which have now become routine in the art world, and gives the audience a chance to scrutinize the assumptions underlying these now accepted tropes.
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