Xu Bing: Tobacco Project explores the production and culture of tobacco as seen through the eyes of one of China’s most innovative contemporary artists. The exhibition combines important pieces from the artist’s earlier projects at Duke University in North Carolina and the Shanghai Gallery of Art in China with new work inspired by visits to tobacco farms, warehouses, and cigarette factories in Virginia. Altogether, the exhibition spans a dozen years of Xu Bing’s work and surveys one of his most ambitious undertakings. Xu Bing is considered one of the most important Chinese artists of his generation. Born in 1955, he lived through a tumultuous period in China’s history. After being sent to the countryside as a teen during the Cultural Revolution, he returned to Beijing to study and then teach printmaking at the Central Academy of Fine Arts during successive waves of tightening and loosening government control over the arts. A central and controversial figure in the Chinese New Wave Movement, he moved to the United States in 1990 shortly after the Tiananmen uprising.
www.xubing.com
