Two paintings, a lot of raw fabric and dye, and a Hong Kong studio that never seems to have a clean floor - that's roughly where CORD's festive “Sai” print started.

This season, we worked with Indian contemporary artist Sai Pradhan to bring her paintings off the wall and onto clothing you can actually live in. Here's how it came together, and who Sai is.

Meet Sai Pradhan: The Artist Behind CORD’s Festive Collaboration

Sai Pradhan was born in Mumbai and grew up moving between the city and various parts of the United States. She now lives and works in Hong Kong, with her husband and their three rescue dogs, Sophy, Wystan and Zola, usually somewhere in the studio.

Her path to painting full-time wasn't straightforward. She holds a BA in International Affairs from George Washington University and an LLM in International Law from the University of Edinburgh, and studied further at SOAS, the Rhode Island School of Design, the Insight School of Interior Design, and Harvard's executive education programme. Before art, there were years of entrepreneurial and corporate work in tech, media and communications, across New York, Los Angeles and Hong Kong. At some point, she chose to put her time and energy into painting instead — a decision she describes as deliberate rather than sudden.

When Sai first saw CORD's clothes, she called them a modern take on age-neutral, timeless dressing — something sitting comfortably between flowing South Asian fabrics and easy Western silhouettes. What sealed the collaboration, by her own account, was a conversation with CORD's founders, Neha and Pranav, where it became obvious everyone was seeing the same thing.

The Story Behind Sai Pradhan’s “About Myths”

The two artworks behind CORD's print come from Sai's ongoing series, With regard to Myths. These are large, organic figurative paintings made directly on raw fabric, built up in layers of stain and paint rather than a single sitting. Some run six feet tall. None of them are framed — Sai hangs them unstretched, more like tapestries than paintings on a wall.

The series is her way of thinking through how people attach themselves to symbols and repeated patterns, and how those patterns quietly turn into something bigger than decoration — scaffolds we hang meaning and identity on, until the ordinary starts to feel almost sacred. It's a slow, layered idea, and the paintings themselves are slow and layered to match.

Dogs, Geckos and Eggs: The Symbols Behind Her Art

Three motifs keep showing up across With regard to Myths, and each one carries a real story rather than a decorative flourish.

The dog is her late, much-loved rescue — a stand-in for love and, inevitably, loss. The gecko comes from something her grandmother used to tell her during childhood summers in Pune: a small household creature turned, in Sai's retelling, into a quiet nudge to use our time the way we actually want to while we're here. And the eggs carry over from earlier work, where she painted women contemplating them as a way of sitting with ideas of expiry, productivity, and reproductive choice.

Around these figures, Sai builds out whole worlds — grand arches, ornate window grills, commemorative torans of the kind found in temples, forts, and plenty of Indian homes during the festive season. Put together, the three motifs read less like a private diary and more like a shared mythology of love, loss, and the passage of time, which is probably why they translate so easily to something as public as clothing.

How Travel Shapes Sai Pradhan’s Artistic Language

Sai has lived in a genuinely long list of places — Mumbai growing up, various American cities as a teenager, university towns in England and Scotland, and now Hong Kong — and travelled to somewhere around sixty countries along the way. That kind of movement tends to leave a mark on how someone sees, and Sai is upfront about the fact that her visual instincts come directly from it.

She points out that the free-flowing figures and flourishes in With regard to Myths echo the movement of hand-drawn Rangoli or mehndi, while also carrying traces of Art Deco and Art Nouveau — two movements that themselves travelled widely and changed shape wherever they landed. Closer to home, she pulls in pandan trees and beach naupaka shrubs from around her current house in Hong Kong, alongside architectural details from cities that mean something to her personally: window grills and gates from Mumbai, London, New York and Hong Kong. It's less a fixed style than a running conversation between places.

From Artwork to Wearable Print: Creating the CORD “Sai” Print

Sai had already pictured her paintings turning into garments before CORD approached her, which made saying yes an easy call. Two works from With regard to Myths were adapted into what's now CORD's “Sai” print, shot for the collaboration by the CORD team in India and by Emily Tse in Hong Kong.

“It's a delight to work with people who understand the delicate dance of art turning into fashion.”

That's Sai's own description of the process, and it captures the balance we were trying to strike — keeping enough of the original painting's texture and hand-drawn imperfection intact, while adapting it to sit well across a garment rather than a wall.

When Art Becomes Part of Everyday Life

Asked what she'd want a first-time viewer to notice, Sai talked about attention — real, unhurried attention — as the best thing anyone can offer a handmade object. She's also fairly direct about wanting her work to carry a sense of having always existed, rather than the overly polished, slightly synthetic perfection she sees in so much AI-generated imagery today. That's a high bar for a painting, and an even higher one for a print on clothing. But it's exactly why the collaboration felt worth doing: the idea that a piece of clothing can hold onto some of an artist's hand, rather than smoothing it away.

About the CORD x Sai Pradhan Collaboration

The CORD x Sai Pradhan collaboration is part of CORD's Elsewhere | FW '26 launch, bringing two paintings from her About Myths series into the “Sai” print across the new line. Sai's practice, beyond this collaboration, spans painting, writing and exhibitions across Hong Kong and India — including a solo show at Anita Chan Lai-ling Gallery, Fringe Club, and group exhibitions at N+ Museum, Crushed, Hong Kong Visual Arts Centre and the Affordable Art Fair. She's also supported auction fundraisers for the Hong Kong Dignity Institute and Hong Kong Marriage Equality, and previously collaborated with Hong Kong Dog Rescue.