“Compton, yo. Yup. And you were doing those tiny sculptures. And then in Miami, remember?”
She did. The first time they’d met, almost five years ago, he’d been a sweet-faced, small-town boy in a dead man’s suit, hanging on the edges of conversations, downing flute after courage-building flute of Taittinger. Six months later, when she’d seen him again, he was manning a booth in the publications ghetto at one of the ancillary fairs at Art Basel—NADA, maybe, or SCOPE—and looked so like a disaffected ex–prep schooler that she’d doubted her own memory of him. That is until he’d pumped her awkwardly for invites to all of the week’s parties and recounted the art world luminaries he’d seen: Robert Rauschenberg in a wheelchair having a caipirinha! Jeffrey Deitch rocking to the Scissor Sisters! Tobey Maguire watching Terry Richardson watch Amanda Lepore!
“When you started writing for the party pages. What are you up to now? Are you still the Army Archerd of the art world?”
“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.