“Tobacco Project” is an extended project that collects and organizes materials related to tobacco that cannot be easily defined as art or sociology. The project began in 1999 in Durham, home of the Duke family; passed through Shanghai in 2004; and in 2011 extended once more to Virginia — locations closely intertwined with tobacco.

Tobacco is an object that permeates—it pervades all spaces, ends in ashes, and has many different connections with individuals and the world more broadly—in economics, culture, law, morality, faith, fashion, living space, personal interest, and more. Xu Bing is interested in reflecting on the problems and weaknesses of humanity by exploring the long and entangled relationship between humans and tobacco.

The work is mainly comprised of over 400 calligraphic variants of the Chinese character “niao”, meaning bird, carved in colored acrylic and laid out in a shimmering track that rises from the floor into the air. On the gallery floor Chinese characters in the “simplified style” script popularized during the Mao era are used to write out the dictionary definition for niao. The bird/niao characters then break away from the confines of the literal definition and take flight through the installation space. As they rise into the air, the characters “de-evolve” from the simplified system to standardized Chinese text and finally to the ancient Chinese pictograph hasde upon a bird’s actual appearance. At the uppermost point of the installation, a flock of these ancient characters, in form of both bird and word, soar high into the rafters toward the upper windows of the space, as though attempting to break free of the words with which humans attempt to categorize and define them.

The colorful, shimmering imagery of the installation imparts a magical, fairy-tale like quality. Yet the overt simplicity, charm and ready comprehensibility of the work has the underlying effect of guiding the audience to open up the “cognitive space” of their minds to the implications of, and relationships between, word, concept, symbol and image.

2011

Materials: Natural debris attached to frosted glass panel

Location: British Museum, London, United Kingdom

Location: Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, Virginia, USA
Medium: Mixed media installation/ Tobacco leaves, live tobacco plants, various tobacco related materials

A site-specific continuation of the Tobacco Project series, a project investigating the long and entangled relationship between human and tobacco.

After executing the project in Durham (2000) and Shanghai (2004), Xu Bing brought it to another important city related to tobacco: Richmond, Virginia, home of Philip Morris and mother company of teh famous Marlboro cigarette brand. During the residency, he studied tobacco's intimate relationship with the American continent and its early immigrant history. In addition to Tobacco Book, Traveling Down the River, 1st Class (another "tiger-skin carpet" composed of over 500,000 "First Class" brand cigarettes), and many works created for the first two phases of Tobacco Project, he expanded his art project on tobacco inlcuding print works. These works raised profound questions about history and reality, global capital, cultural immersion, and labor market.

Selected work description: 

Backbone, 2011

It is a book composed of early tobacco brand designs that Xu Bing collected in Virginia. He then asked his friend Rene Balcer, a writer, director, and filmmaker, to write a blues poem incorporating tobacco brand slogans. It is titled Backbone after an early brand of tobacco. 

2011

Materials: Cut and painted acrylic 

Location: The Morgan Library & Museum, New York, USA