Under the artists' name Ghost of a Dream, Lauren Was and Adam Eckstrom started a collaborative project in New York, where the two artists live. After artist’s residencies in Basel and Berlin, Galerie Paris Beijing is pleased to welcome them for the first time to Beijing and present site-specific installations in a solo show entitled Price of Happiness.

Based on collages and large scale objects, their strongly visual works revolve around promises of wealth offered by the lottery. Lottery tickets are pasted everywhere in Ghost of a Dream’s work. These scratched tickets carry real dreams that mostly disappear just as quickly as they come. Although they are just discarded bits of paper, they represent fantasies of opulence, which vanish and reappear with each new lottery ticket.

In Price of Happiness, these dreams come alive through artistic compositions of objects, mirrors, photographs and slogans. In a country which is fascinated by the Western way of life and at a time where universal dreams are associated with consumption frenzy, these artists show us faded dreams and the process which is inherent in this fast easy money game: the hope of winning followed by the frustration of losing. In the end, these escapist moments make us lose much more than we win, as they create a bright future that will never exist.

Both born in the USA, Lauren Was and Adam Eckstrom met while attending graduate school at Rhode Island School of Design, where Adam graduated in painting and Lauren in sculpture. They founded the artistic duo Ghost of a Dream in 2007 and a year later made their first piece in the Easy Money series, The Dream Car. Their work has been exhibited in New York, Rhode Island, Miami, Berlin, London and Basel and also has been featured in The Guardian (London), The Independent (London), Time Out (New York), and the World of Interiors among other publications. In November 2009, they received the first annual Young Masters Art Prize in London.