Puff Piece
about 154 months ago (09/15/2011)
Puff Piece – ARTnews.com Skip to main content By Lilly Wei Plus Icon Lilly Wei author View All September 15, 2011 10:00am Xu Bing printing on whole tobacco leaves. COURTESY DUKE UNIVERSITY , DURHAM, NORTH CAROLINA “The ‘Tobacco Project’ began with an interest in the aroma of tobacco,” Chinese artist Xu Bing says over a dim-sum breakfast in New York. Likening it to something between sociology and art, he is referring to the third iteration of an ambitious, multidisciplinary undertaking based on the fraught subject of tobacco called, appropriately enough, “Tobacco Project: Duke/Shanghai/Virginia, 1999–2011.” In 1999, Xu Bing visited Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, to give a lecture and was struck by the smell of tobacco everywhere.