The Wangs vs. the World (17 page)

“I wrote about you then, remember?”

Saina had gone to Basel that year without a gallery, but with a plan. The group show where she’d met Billy was her last. She’d been in New York for six years at that point—four at Columbia, two after—and she was making sculptures that were, she saw later, very derivative of her idol, Lee Bontecou, but intricate and tiny where Bontecou’s could dominate whole rooms. They weren’t attracting much attention. That might have been alright—
Ars longa, vita brevis,
she lied to herself—but Saina didn’t want to be one of those girls who lived on her parents’ money and called herself an artist in a way that slowly devolved into paid vanity shows, duty sales to those parents’ friends, and membership on museum boards in lieu of any real artistic creation. When the only sale she made was to strange, miniature KoKo, the makeup artist whose line her father manufactured, Saina could see the sad, gilded path that stretched out before her.

Disheartened, she volunteered for one of Cai Guo-Qiang’s gunpowder pieces. His suspended car-crash sculpture had just gone up at MASS MoCA, and this was a way to get close to an artist of his stature without signing on for unsung months as a studio assistant. Too, she was curious about his main assistant, a girl her age whose father happened to be the president of Taiwan and who Saina’s own father rather baldly hoped she would befriend.

It was three cold fall days of kneeling on concrete floors in a cavernous warehouse near Cai’s New York studio, X-Acto knifing stencils out of a playing-field-size sheet of cardboard. The show, titled
Sky Ladder,
was a compendium of failed flying machines rendered in exploded gunpowder. Once the stencils were carved, each employee had a very specific job. One person followed behind him and lifted the stencils off the cardboard, another carried a stack of reference images that he matched to each awkward carving, a third pushed around a little cart stacked with bowl upon bowl of different gunpowders that he sprinkled as casually as you would salt on an icy road. Once the powder was ignited—a satisfying explosion of sparks and smoke—a fourth and fifth ran in and pounded out the embers with little pom-poms made of T-shirt scraps. It was like a factory where all the robots were imbued with ambition and anxiety instead of intelligence. Cai, on the other hand, was unwavering as the calm and cool center of everyone’s gaze, a gaze he seemed simultaneously not to notice and to be electrically aware of.

As they waited and watched, one of the other volunteers, a China studies professor who treated the artist like a god, told them that during the summer Dragon Boat Festival, when all of the bugs and monsters awaken, it was traditional to make a mixture of sulfur and liquor, and write the word
wang
—王—on children’s foreheads.
King,
like her own surname.
King,
like the tiger’s stripes, because the tiger was the king of the forest and the yellow of sulfur is a tiger yellow. The professor relished the telling of his tale, and a few feet away from them, small worlds exploded.

Saina hated herself for thinking it, but the whole thing struck her as immediately, resolutely, male. The immensity of scale, the use of gunpowder, the corralling of volunteers to do the artist’s bidding. Women, she realized, were scared to be assholes. And what is any artist, really, but someone who doesn’t mind being an asshole?

That was when she birthed her plan:
Be an Asshole
.

So she went to Basel without a gallery, but waiting for her in her ocean-facing room at the Delano were three giant cardboard boxes that contained a thousand lightweight Tyvek jackets, as thin as tissues, special ordered for $4.85 apiece from a factory in Guangzhou.

On the back of each jacket, from neck to waist, was a giant, pixilated image of her face in a rainbow of acid brights.

On the front, sprawled across the chest, her signature:
Saina
.

By eight o’clock on the morning of the vernissage, nine of the ten young club promoters she’d hired via a DJ friend had shown up, all wearing sunglasses and toting Starbucks, all unexpectedly enthusiastic once she outlined the plan of attack. She loaded each of them down with a hundred factory-fresh jackets, three hundred dollars in dollar bills—paper clipped into bundles of five—and a map of Miami with their territory highlighted in yellow. She took the last hundred, slinging the nearly thirty pounds of Tyvek in a bag over her shoulder, and set out with her nine warriors.

The first man she’d approached was sitting on a crate outside a Starbucks, holding up a cardboard sign that he’d markered with,
$$$ OR
☺. He’d locked eyes with her as she’d begun to explain, cutting her off and yelling, “I don’t see a smile! Smiles or dollars!” So Saina had plastered a grin on her face as she held out the jacket, but still he’d spat at her, full of anger. “You think I can’t make my own fashion styles? You think you can buy my body? My body? You can’t buy my body! I wouldn’t sell you my mind and now you come swinging for my body!” She’d backed away, frightened, worried that the whole project was going to end with this. Behind her, there was wild, threatening laughter and Saina had felt a moment of genuine fear. Did the man have friends coming to his defense, ready to jump the clueless rich girl who’d thought that she could exploit them all so easily? Turning, she’d faced three teenagers, Mohawks atop their baby faces, band patches safety pinned to their ripped denim vests. One of them held a gray pit bull puppy on a length of soiled rope.

“Sorry, sorry, um, cute dog,” she’d said, trying to retreat before they got mad at her, too.

“Hey, lady, I’ll do it.”

“What?”

“Yeah, you said it was for art, right?”

“Yeah! It is. I’m an artist.” Saina had scrambled in her bag, pulling out three jackets. “Yeah, if you could just wear them for today, that’s it.”

The one with the pit bull looked at her, skeptical, not making a move to take it. “I’m an artist, too,” he said.

“Cool.”

“So we support your art, what are you going to do to support mine?”

Saina felt in her pocket and reached for three paper-clipped sets of bills. “How’s this? For each of you.”

His friends had snatched the cash and pulled on their jackets in one easy motion, her face swallowing up their punk posturing, but he’d taken the money from her fingers slowly, deliberately, curling his lip as he pocketed the bills. “Makes things pretty easy, huh?” he’d snarled, before moving on with his friends, her jacket, nonetheless, on his back.

The rest of the day was easier. Saina hadn’t counted on the number of homeless people who would be passed out—drunk or asleep—that early in the morning, but she’d ended up overcoming her guilt and just draping a jacket over each prone form, holding her breath against the urine smell of neglect that wafted up at her every time. When she’d texted the others and suggested they do the same, the responses had come back fast—
Yep DUN! Duh, doing it. Thought that wuz the plan?
Hustlers all. Saina mentally filed junior club promoters alongside talent agency assistants and nail salon owners as reliable sources of creative aggression.

And three hours later, there it was: Saina’s face and name on the body of every single homeless person in the city of Miami.

When eleven o’clock approached, Saina inserted herself in the teeming press of people outside the convention center; well-preserved Miami women in furs and flimsy dresses jostled against global nomads in bespoke suits and art students in carefully constructed personas. Then the glass doors were flung open and the crowd surged in, hot and eager, and within minutes, an epidemic of little red stickers bloomed like measles across the hall. Those who weren’t buying were talking, and one of the main topics was the rash of Saina’s face across the city. Some thought it was brilliant; some thought it was disgusting. Everyone who mattered thought it was both.

By the end of the vernissage, her voicemail box was full of frantic calls from journalists, gallerists, and collectors. That evening a breathless post by Billy hit the web, confirming that she was the artist in question and spilling details about her parentage that she hadn’t realized were common currency. Reports surfaced of homeless men being offered five hundred, seven hundred, a thousand dollars for their jackets—stains, stench, and all—and before she even landed back in New York, Saina received a dinner invitation from a soft-spoken gallerist whose artists often found themselves being asked to take over the Turbine Hall at the Tate or the Guggenheim ramp.

And then for four years that should have lasted forever, everything was perfect. Her first show,
Made in China,
opened on June 4, 2004, the fifteenth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre. The opening was a fashion show with a tightly edited line of ten different looks that Saina culled from thousands of photographs of protesters on the streets of Beijing. Each one was re-created with painstaking precision by a collective of seamstresses in China. The last look, titled “Wedding Gown,” was a copy of the white button-down shirt and black trousers worn by Tank Man, the famous lone protester who faced down a column of tanks armed with only a plastic shopping bag in his right hand and a satchel in his left.

Anyone who stopped by the gallery after opening night found a replica of a high-end boutique, where the pieces were hung in editions of three: S, M, L. In one corner was a dressing room where patrons could try on the art as long as they didn’t mind being watched via video feed by a group of tittering Chinese seamstresses taking tea breaks. Within ten days, a scandalized local government official shut down the China-side link—word was that he barged into the break room with two local toughs while a well-known fashion editor was on-screen clad in nothing more than her signature bob—but by that time, the show had sold out and Saina’s reputation was assured.

See Me/Say You
opened the next fall. Each day for ninety days she had gone out into the city with an old leather mah-jongg case emptied of its game pieces and filled instead with pastels, watercolors, pens, and markers; sandwiched under one arm were a pair of clipboards, each with a sheet of rough Arches paper. Each day for ninety days she’d searched out one unsuspecting New Yorker and asked that person to draw her, Saina, the artist. As they did, she drew them, picking up the materials that her portraitist laid down, making the two of them into twins of a sort. When the show opened, all of the pieces were suspended face-to-face, forming a long, narrow corridor that placed the viewer in between Saina and her subject/creator.

After the public opening, Louis Vuitton threw an intimate, late-night dinner for seventy-five and issued a very limited-edition case with neat little compartments for an impractical rainbow of art supplies. She spent that whole evening smiling and smiling, suddenly used to the fact that everyone in the room wanted to get close to her.

That was where she met Grayson.

She already knew who he was. He’d exploded out of Cooper Union with his clubscapes—chaotic, room-size installations composed of trash scavenged from the Dumpsters of the Soho House, the Norwood, the Colony, cobbled into replicas of the exclusive interiors of those same private clubs. The openings were eerie bacchanals, dark and heavy with pumped-in scent meant to underscore the sweet stink of rotting trash, thumping with the sound mixes that Grayson put together from surreptitious recordings made of conversations between club members. Collectors and critics alike blew rails beneath grotesque reproductions of the Core Club’s art collection, starlets waded topless into the roiling muck that mimicked the sulfur baths at the Colony.

The two of them were instantly besotted, and it was all Saina could do to pull away for long enough to put together her Whitney project:
Power Drum Song.
Manhattan’s tourist spots were full of street-corner artists straight from China’s Central Academy of Fine Arts who could produce a picture-perfect rendering of anyone who sat in front of them. Saina trolled South Street Seaport and Central Park for her favorites, then employed her stunted Chinese to gauge their experience with more traditional Song dynasty scroll paintings. In the end, she hired fourteen of the artists, all men, and matched each of them with a young couple. She and Grayson also sat for one of the pieces, painted in classical style with inksticks and calligraphy brushes, then mounted on long vertical hanging scrolls.

At the opening, each artist was posed uncomfortably by the scroll he’d painted, limbs arranged to mimic one of the subjects in the piece. Most of the men treated the whole thing as a lark—if the crazy American girl was going to pay them one thousand dollars apiece to paint her friends like Chinese people and then be examined and exclaimed over by peacocks holding wineglasses, then, by god, they’d do it!—but one of them, the one who spoke the most serviceable English, held out for an exorbitant raise. “You think we don’t know art world?” he demanded. “Not for wall at home! Gallery! Museum! You pay five thousand dollars!” And, in the end, she had.

It was all worth it when Peter Schjeldahl’s review—a full column!—had come out in
The New Yorker,
saying that she was brave and brilliant for “exposing the uncomfortable tête-à-tête betwixt the viewer and the viewed by turning the artist’s twenty-first-century position of power back to a position of servitude—the brush only strokes at the command of its paymaster, the hand that holds the brush has no more agency than the bristles themselves.”

A hat trick. A trifecta. A father, son, and holy ghost of growing critical and commercial success that, of course, had to be gunned down by unlucky number four. Saina remembered her mother telling her, when she was very young, never to choose the number four.
Sz.
It sounded like the word for death and was so unlucky that people avoided phone numbers and addresses with the number, which was why her undemanding mother always insisted on a room change whenever they were assigned to the fourth floor of a hotel. Her fourth solo show, which had opened this spring, the one that had taken the most work, the most thought, the most time, was torn down by the same people who had praised her every previous effort. And then, on top of that, the lady reporters went crazy. Jezebel came out with an early post trashing her show—their commenters called it “emotionally rapey.” The day after, the
Huffington Post, Slate
’s Double XX blog, and
Ms.
magazine joined in. Soon, in a mind-boggling show of solidarity, the American Task Force on Palestine, Amnesty International, and the American Jewish Committee had banded together and issued a statement condemning Saina, her privileged ignorance, her gallery, American intervention in foreign wars, and the general callousness of the art world. For two weeks, protesters had picketed the show until her gallerist finally shuttered it a week early, claiming that the space had been cited for code violations and needed to make emergency renovations. The next day Hermès issued a statement apologizing for their involvement and pledging that all proceeds from the sale of the scarves they’d special issued for her show would be donated to refugee charities.