The Wangs vs. the World(41)
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.