Where there's smoke

by Lisa Movius

When Xu Bing first visited Durham, N.C., at the invitation of Duke University in 2000, he was struck by the overwhelming tobacco odor pervading the town. The smell inspired him to put together the site-specific exhibition "Tobacco Project: Durham," a series of works and installations using tobacco and its paraphernalia as both topic and medium. For the exhibition's second installment, "Tobacco Project: Shanghai," Xu brought a bit of Durham to the Bund, starting with the pungent tobacco aroma filling the Shanghai Gallery of Art.

This was the Sichuan native's first solo show in mainland China since he emigrated to the U.S. in 1990, alter his installation Book from the Sky (1988) attracted government hostility. Since then, Xu Bing has developed a reputation as one of the leading Chinese artists in exile, and in 1999 was awarded a MacArthur Foundation fellowship. While many of Xu's works are designed around a site, "Tobacco Project: Durham" remains his largest and most thematically expansive undertaking to date.

Organized by Wu Hung, a U.S.-based art historian who curated the 2002 Guangzhou Triennial, the Shanghai version of "Tobacco Project" was far smaller and less ambitious than the original. The majority of the pieces in this installment were repeated from Durham, although a handful were new and site-specific. Cigarettes laid out with their filters and paper forming an orange-and-white likeness of a traditional tiger-skin rug covered a good quarter of the gallery floor for Tobacco Invention (2004). The color and contours varied according to one's angle of view. In the painted scenes of A Window Facing the Bund (2004), Shanghai's riverside line-up of colonial banks and trading palaces gradually melded into a Chinese dock crowded with tobacco ships and then into Durham and the Duke campus. The images spread over several walls, punctuated by windows offering a panorama of the actual Bund, the Huangpu River and the futuristic Pudong district beyond.

Xu is best known for works that playfully explore language and the esthetic of Chinese characters, thus recalling the artist's background in printing and Chinese calligraphy. The Language of Smoke 1902 (2004), a satellite piece located in an old tobacco warehouse, continued in that tradition with giant neon character lights spilling across a floor wafted by artificial smoke. The text was drawn from a 1902 British-American Tobacco advertisement distributed in China.

The Language of Smoke 1902 closely resembled a piece from the Durham show, Longing (2000), which featured the word in neon covered with smoke. Likewise, Tobacco Book (2004), a massive cigarette-history text printed on tobacco leaves infested with beetles that slowly consumed the "pages" over the course of the exhibition, was physically identical to the original Tobacco Book (2000), but written in Chinese instead of English.

Other works reshown from Durham included Spring Festival Along the River (2000/04), in which a 33-foot-long cigarette burns across a copy of a Song Dynasty scroll by the same name. Cases displayed smaller objects like cigarettes imprinted with old Chinese poems or quotations from Mao Zedong, and a pipe sprouting a plethora of mouthpieces in both Asian and Western styles. One wall of the gallery showed Xu's conceptual sketches and photos of the Durham exhibition, alluding to the historical commentary and interactive aspects somewhat lacking in the Shanghai show. For example, a work at Durham about the death of the artist's father from lung cancer was omitted in Shanghai. The Tobacco Project Questionnaire installation, an interactive piece about smoking and quitting, was likewise left out. Tobacco use remains politically accepted and socially encouraged in mainland China, and indeed much of Asia. "Tobacco Project: Shanghai" thus rather studiously avoided the locally unpopular subject of smoking's deleterious effects.

"Tobacco Project: Shanghai" was on view at the Shanghai Gallery of Art [Aug. 21 Sept. 18, 2004].