MASS MoCA, review by Tommy Petroskey

                                                                                                

The Tobacco Project
by Tommy Petroskey

What do you get when you cross tiger skin with 500,000 cigarettes?  Xu Bing’s fantastically genius works of art of course!  Xu Bing is a Chinese artist who was born in 1955 and lived through countless historical Chinese events, including the Cultural Revolution.  It wasn’t until 2004 when Xu Bing started his Tobacco Project to try to relate human issues to symbolic forms of his art.  In 2011 Bing finally made his masterpiece in the Tobacco Project, the tiger-skin rug made up of half a million cigarettes.

Throughout the Tobacco Project Xu Bing had been poking at the idea that cigarettes are the death of us, however, the tiger skin rug was the best possible symbol to his main idea.  The piece astonished me at first.  Never had I seen anything like it.  Not only did the quantity of the piece overwhelm me but also the creativeness of positioning the cigarettes to produce shading and different colors.  I had so many questions about the piece the second I laid my eyes on it.  How was it made?  What was his motivation?  What does it mean?  How are all the cigarettes staying together?  How many cigarettes are there? And the list went on.  Xu Bing did such an incredible job with this work of art I could not find anything I didn’t like about it.  In fact I was looking to find something I didn’t like about it, and I did not find one single thing.  The piece was assembled on the floor in Mass MoCA, (Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art) meaning I could walk 360 degrees around it for the full affect.  Given that the cigarettes were positioned just so, on the opposite side of piece appeared the tobacco rolled inside each cigarette.  This was my favorite aspect of the piece because this affect changed the color of the tiger skin from the traditional orange and white to brownish black and white just by looking at it from a different angle.  Xu Bing’s fantastic work does an incredible job of capturing the essence of human addictions and eccentric design and creativity.  This exhibit left me fascinated for hours afterwards and would highly recommend experiencing some of Bing’s artwork in the near future.