2004

Medium: Drawing on the windows and wall

Size: Varies

Exhibition: Xu Bing Tobacco Project: Shanghai, Shanghai Gallery of Art, Shanghai, China, 2004

2004

Medium: Ceramic ashtray, paint

Size: 1 1/8 x 3 1/2 x 3 1/2 in

Exhibition: Xu Bing Tobacco Project: Shanghai, Shanghai Gallery of Art, Shanghai, China, 2004

                  Tobacco Project 3, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, Virginia, USA, 2011

2004

Medium: "Zhong Nanhai" brand cigarettes, acrylic box

Size: 3 3/4 x 3 /1/2 x 3 1/3 in

Exhibition: Xu Bing Tobacco Project: Shanghai, Shanghai Gallery of Art, Shanghai, China, 2004

                  Tobacco project 3, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, Virginia, USA, 2011

2004

Medium: Scroll, cigarettes

Size: Approx. 315 in

Exhibition: Xu Bing Tobacco Project: Shanghai, Shanghai Gallery of Art, Shanghai, China, 2004

2004

Medium: Tobacco leaves rubber-stamped with passage from Sherman Cochran, Big Business in China: Sino-Foreign Rivalry in the Cigarette Industry, 1890-1930 (1980), in Chinese translation

Size: Approx. 48 x 84 1/4 in

Exhibition: Xu Bing Tobacco Project: Shanghai, Shanghai Gallery of Art, Shanghai, China, 2004

2004

Medium: Ink on two packages of "555" brand cigarettes

Size: 2 1/8 x 3 1/2 x 1 in

2004

Medium: Archival materials (originals)

Size: 33.4 x 21.5 cm, 21.7 x 27.6 cm, 25.5 x 35.4 cm, 20.8 x 28 cm, 21.4 x 27.7 cm, 24 x 32 cm

Exhibition: Xu Bing Tobacco Project: Shanghai, Shanghai Gallery of Art, Shanghai, China, 2004

This particular piece sets itself apart from the other works in the Tobacco Project series. It comprises six texts related to tobacco. The first document focuses on the investment and business activities of the British American Tobacco Company in China a hundred years ago. The second document is a British American Tobacco Company sales report, providing insights into the remarkable quantity of cigarettes sold in Shanghai during the month of October 1919. The third document is a record of the profits earned by the British American Tobacco Company’s in China from October 1918 to June 1919. The fourth document reveals that a portion of the company’s profits in China were transferred to the United States to fund Trinity College, which was the predecessor of Duke University. The fifth document consists of the budget and payment stub for Xu Bing’s implementation of the Tobacco Design-1: Durham project in July 1998, which was funded by Duke University. Lastly, the sixth document is a payment check for certain works in Tobacco Project: Durham, which were collected by a museum in the United States in August 2004. This piece serves as the final touch to the entire Tobacco Project, bringing together various historical and financial aspects to the tobacco industry.

2004

Medium: Wood tobacco pipe with 7 stems (seventh stem added in 2011)

Size: 8.6 x 31 x 26.7 cm

Exhibition: Xu Bing Tobacco Project: Shanghai, Shanghai Gallery of Art, Shanghai, China, 2004

2004

Medium: Branches, red match-head paste, vase

Size: Approx. 70 in

Exhibition: Xu Bing Tobacco Project: Shanghai, Shanghai Gallery of Art, Shanghai, China, 2004

2004

Medium: 43 neon lights forming text of early-twentieth-century Chinese tobacco advertisement, stage smoke

Size: Varies

Exhibition: Xu Bing Tobacco Project: Shanghai, Shanghai Gallery of Art, Shanghai, China, 2004

2004

Medium: 660,000 “Wealth” brand cigarettes, spray adhesive, cardboard

Size: Approx. 354 x 275 in

Exhibition: Xu Bing Tobacco Project: Shanghai, Shanghai Gallery of Art, Shanghai, China, 2004

2004

Medium: “Dannemann” brand cigarillos, rubber-stamped with computer keyboard characters, original metal case with interior of lid interior selectively scratched off to create computer logos

Size: Case (closed): 3 1/2 x 3 7/8 in.

Exhibition: Xu Bing Tobacco Project: Shanghai, Shanghai Gallery of Art, Shanghai, China, 2004

                  Tobacco Project 3, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, Virginia, USA, 2011

The Background Story series is constructed of a combination of plants and stones, arranged in a manner reminiscent of a traditional East Asian painting. As visiors move through the exhibition, they may encounter a passageway that offers a glimpse behind the scenes. Here, they can observe dry twigs and branches of pine trees, as well as decorations made from simple materials like modeling clay and cotton wool, held together with adhesive tape and fishing line. 

This behind-the-scenes view allows visitors to witness something that would normally be kept hidden at an exhibition. Behind the walls of the exhibition space, there is a maintenance area with heating pipes and empty shelving. From the outside, only the surface is visible, but upon closer inspection, one can discover the internal workings closely intertwined with the external image.

2004

Material: Dust

In this installation Xu Bing uses dust that he collected from the streets of lower-Manhattan in the aftermath of September 11th. In the work, Xu Bing references the fine whitish-grey film that covered downtown New York in the weeks following 9-11, and recreates a field of dust across the gallery floor that is punctuated by the outline of a Zen Buddhist poem, revealed as if the letters have been removed from under the layer: 

As there is nothing from the first,

Where does the dust itself collect?

In the work Xu Bing discusses the relationship between the material world and the spiritual world, exploring the complicated circumstances created by different world perspectives. The dust was applied to the floor with a leaf blower and allowed 24 hours to settle. 

The work won the inaugural Artes Mundi Prize, the Wales International Visual Art Prize in 2004 and was later shown at various venues across the world. 

2004

Location:  Sala La Gallera, Valencia, Spain
Medium: Mixed media installation

...''The Well'' makes use of practically the whole of the ground floor of the venue ''La Gallera'' - a former arena built for cockfights which, after a period when it fell into disuse, was converted into an art gallery and is now a space for special projects of contemporary art. The twelve arches that support the upper floors and flank the central lower space have been blocked off with ''bricks'' of newspapers - as if they were building bricks, irregular slabs of stone - cutting off both physical and visual access to the inside. The public is then forced to go around the outside of this wall and go up to the second floor where it can, and only from here, contemplate the visual scene and spectacle happening on the inside of this kind of well formed by the wall of newspaper... On the bottom of this well, in what was formerly the arena of the cockfights, Xu Bing has placed a covering of natural grass (uneven, worn, and parched in spots, ''to transmit the idea that nobody has entered into this space for a long, long time'') and on it lie the skeletons of fowls, both large and small, some intact, others partially intact with scattered bones, naturally placed, as if time and destiny had scattered them randomly...

-- Rico, Pablo J. ''Xu Bing and the Well of Truth.'' Exhibition Catalog, (La Gallera de Valencia, Spain: 2004). 

Medium: mixed media installation/ cast aluminum

...The towering new creation that cascades from the top of the Elvehjem's Paige Court is a celebration rather than a memorial. "The Glassy Surface of a Lake" (formerly titled "Net") is inspired by a passage in Henry David Thoreau's "Walden," a meditation on the profound purity of an utterly still lake. In the passage, the famous naturalist writer inverts his viewpoint to envision the lake hovering overhead so "you could walk right under it to the opposite hills."
Xu has re-created that vision in the museum: the suspended lake takes the form of the very letters of Thoreau's passage. Thousands of wire-linked aluminum letters hover at the top of the three-story museum court and, in the middle of the "lake," letters tumble down to the first floor. As we gaze up this shaft of metaphorical liquid, what are we meant to see?
In his fresh perspective on the lake, Thoreau envisions the lake as no less than "Earth's eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature." Do we see ourselves mirrored in those watery depths? Can each of us measure our nature in this mirror of nature?
For sure, mirroring definitions of the same word ("nature") reflect the play of words and life - and the urgent need to protect both from poisoning rhetoric. If the thousands of wired-together letters lack the elegance of a still lake, Xu, the Elvehjem staff (and UW-Madison students) have nevertheless produced a marvelous confabulation.

-- Kevin Lynch, ''Xu Bing and The Power of Words.'' The Capital Times, 10 Sept, 2004. 

Location: Shanghai Gallery of Art, Shanghai, China
Medium: Mixed media installation / Tobacco, found objects

A site-specific continuation of the Tobacco Project series, a project investigating the long and entangled relationship betwene human and tobacco. In preparation for the inaugral exhibition at Duke Univeristy, Durham, North Carolina, in 2000, Xu studied many archival materials and discovered the relationship between the Duke family and China – they were the first to import tobacco-rolling technology to Shanghai. This inspired him to bring the project to Shanghai. In 2004 he released Tobacco Project: Shanghai, curated by Wu Hung.

It featured the Shanghai versions of Tobacco Book, which were first shown in Durham, and also new artworks specific to the materials and venue, broadening the dimensions of his Tobacco Project in terms of history, geography and reality. Through tobacco, the project raised profound questions about history and reality, global capital, cultural immersion, and labor market.

Selected work description:

Honor and Splendor, 2004

Xu Bing used 660,000 cigarettes to compose a giant "tiger-skin carpet." With a soft and luxurious appearance, the "carpet" is a massive display of desire, seduction, and danger – ideas that have been long associated with tobacco but also predominant in the human history. The title not only hints on the brand of cigarettes being used, "Wealth" brand, which is ironically one of the cheapest cigarettes in China, but also alludes to what the "carpet" represnts: desire for wealth and status. 

Traveling Down the River, 2000-2004

A long uncut cigarette burned on a reproduction of a famous Chinese handscroll painting, Along the River during the Qingming Festival by Zhang Zeduan (1085-1145). Zhang's painting depicts the scenary of the peak of Chinese people's commercial life in Song dynasty. The long river embodies a sense of history. The burning cigarettes marks the passage of time, leaving a kind of "emptiness" that is the ultimate destiny of tobacco.

Prophecy, 2004

Out of the entire Tobacco Project series, Prophecy least resembles an artwork. It comprises six texts related to tobacco. The first is a document concerning the investments and commercial activities of the British-American Tobacco Company in China. The second is a ledger of the British-American Tobacco Company’s cigarette sales in China, revealing exhorbitant sales figures for the month of October 1919 in Shanghai. The third records the profits of the British-American Tobacco Company in China between October 1918 and June 1919. The fourth document describes how the British-American Tobacco Company transferred a portion of their Chinese profits to America to fund Trinity College (which later became Duke University). The fifth is from July 1998, the budget and check stub from when Duke University invited and sponsored Xu Bing to make “Tobacco Project: Durham.” The sixth and final one is from August 2004, the receipt for the purchase of a portion of “Tobacco Project: Durham” by an American non-profit. A hundred years of prophecy, this work serves to outline the entirety of the Tobacco Project.

2004

Materials: Light box and natural debris

Location: Museum für Asiatische Kunst, Berlin, Germany

In this new work for the Museum of East Asian Art's show, Xu Bing refers to the history of the museum and its exhibits. He makes the viewer aware of the fact that there is a piece of museum history behind every work of art shown. The museum was founded in 1906, and ninety percent of the collection (5,400 works of art) was taken to the Soviet Union by the Red Army in 1945. This included all sculptures, all lacquer works and jades, the complete collection of early Chinese bronzes (with the exception of two), around 3,000 pieces of Japanese sword guards and important Chinese and Japanese paintings. Photographs of the lost works have been collected for publication in a forthcoming catalogue. From these works, Xu Bing selected a number of paintings that inspired him for this installation. The most significant of these works is the hanging scroll < Birthday Celebration in the Pine Pavilion > by Dai Jin (1388-1462); further models were a mountain landscape by Kano Eitoku (1543-1590) and an anonymous Japanese painting on a six- piece folding screen.