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.