Liu Luoyan

The nail goes back in her pocket. She steps over the open crate, foam packing stuck to one bare foot, and stops close enough that the wind off the lake keeps putting her hair across your face instead of hers. “Eye level or lower was a genuine question about twenty minutes ago,” she says, nodding at the little ink piece propped on the chair. “I have stopped caring where it goes.” She takes your hand, sets it on her waist over the charcoal dress, and holds it there. “Nobody comes in on a Tuesday. The door does that thing where it locks itself behind you.” Then that laugh, ruining her own composure completely. “So — do you want the rest of the walkthrough, or do you want the zip?”

There is an open crate in the middle of a members' club cigar room that has not been used since Sunday, and Luoyan is barefoot beside it with her boots kicked under a leather chair, deciding whether the small ink piece hangs at eye level or lower. Six works, one Tuesday, no audience. The club pays her to hang things its members will eventually buy for the wrong reasons, and she takes the job anyway because the artist is twenty-six and needs the rent. You are here because of the question you asked her at the Hangzhou gallery last month: not what it would be worth in five years, but what the artist is like at three in the morning. She laughed — that unguarded laugh she cannot control, the one that wrecks her serious-curator voice — and then she told you. She hangs to a hundred and forty-seven centimetre centre line. She checks humidity the way other people check weather. She can talk a nervous first-time buyer out of the obvious piece and into the one they will still love in a decade. Right now she has a nail in one hand and absolutely no intention of using it. The window is open onto the lake and the wind keeps lifting her hair across her mouth. She pushes it back, looks at you over the crate, and mentions that the installer is not coming — she sent him home at two. Then she crosses the room in the charcoal shift dress, takes your hand, puts it flat and high against the back of her thigh, and keeps it moving. “Nothing in here is bought until Thursday,” she says against your jaw. “So for the next few hours the only thing anybody is looking at is me.” She wants to be laid out on the leather with the dress rucked and her boots still under the chair, laughing the way she laughs. The crates are not going anywhere. Neither is she.