Xu Bing: work included historical text printed on pressed tobacco leaves Photo:Jim Wallace

Szechwan [Sichuan] Province ... has little contact with the rest of the world and is to all intents and purposes a self-contained country," Thomas noted in his memoir. It was in this "self-contained country" that Xu Bing, arguably the most famous Chinese modern artist working today, was born in 1955--just three years after BAT's assets were seized by the newly ascendant People's Republic government. One afternoon last August, I attended the opening of Xu Bing's Tobacco Project: Shanghai, in the new gallery of art on the Bund. The gallery that afternoon smelled like East Campus when the wind was right, and the scent of cured tobacco from downtown warehouses (now, themselves, transmogrified by developers) wafted across the quad. The effect in Shanghai was more concentrated: As the centerpiece of his display, Xu Bing had arranged 660,000 domestically produced "Fortune" brand cigarettes in imitation of a tiger-skin rug, the stripes created by orienting the filters up or down. The reference was to the elegant furnishings that populated the homes of merchants, like Thomas, who had once lived nearby.

The Shanghai exhibition continued a project Xu Bing had begun in November 2000, when Tobacco Project: Durham, curated by Duke art history professor Stanley Abe, opened in two venues: the foyer of Perkins Library and the Duke Homestead and Tobacco Museum. That project--a series of objects and installations meditating on the complex web of connections binding the tobacco industry, the university, China, and the artist himself--is considered among Xu Bing's best works.

In the Perkins foyer, Xu placed an oversized book made of pressed tobacco leaves, printed with text from historian Sherman Cochran's 1980 study of BAT, Big Business in China: Sino-Foreign Rivalry in the Cigarette Industry, 1890-1930. The display cases, generally occupied by special-collections documents celebrating campus history or achievements, were filled with a cadre of artworks masquerading as artifacts. As University of Chicago art historian Wu Hung later wrote, "Xu Bing neither planned it as a coherent visual display nor emphasized the thematic continuity between individual works. Instead, tobacco inspired him to create a series of disparate objects and installations, each pointing to a specific memory or meditation on general implications of the cigarette to human life." These objects included red tin cases of the Chunghua brand cigarette preferred by Mao Zedong, stamped with lines of Tang-dynasty poetry or excerpts from the "little red book" of Mao quotations, which they resembled.

Shanghai show: Mandarin characters in neon spell out 1920s ad copy Photo: Philip Tinari

In a tobacco packhouse at the Duke Homestead, he installed a white neon sign, rendering in a cursive script the single word "Longing." The word glowed amid drying tobacco leaves and dry ice. On the shed's exterior, he projected medical records documenting his father's slow death from lung cancer. In a gallery inside the main museum building, he let an extremely long cigarette burn slowly atop a reproduction of the famous Song Dynasty hand scroll painting Festival Along the River. "The charcoal scar left on the painting's surface not only alludes to the damage caused by smoking, but also registers the passage of time--a shared element in both smoking a cigarette and viewing a traditional handscroll," Wu Hung noted.

Nearly all of the works on display in Shanghai picked up where Tobacco Project: Durham had left off. A new oversized book made of pressed tobacco leaves graced the entrance (the original had ended up on the men's basketball championship victory bonfire in April 2001). The text of the Shanghai version had been translated into Chinese; "An American Multinational Corporation in China," read one boldfaced subhead. The "artifacts" from the Perkins Library display cases were re-installed in Shanghai, this time framing one long display case showing a string of documents that told the quirky and convincing story of the dynamics at work behind the exhibition--and behind the larger history of the exhibition. Papers spanning a century, documenting first BAT's plans to commence operations in China, then the company's profits in China, then James B. Duke's founding grant to make Trinity College into Duke University, then Duke University's invitation to Xu Bing to stage an exhibition on campus, and finally the university's purchase of some of the works Xu Bing produced for that exhibition, were linked by little red arrows.

This sort of witty, detached joking was only one part of Tobacco Project's messages. Because of his father's death, cigarettes were also deeply sentimental objects to Xu Bing. In Shanghai, in place of the word "Longing" that had appeared in the packhouse at Duke Homestead, Xu Bing installed a new neon work that spelled out copy from a 1920s BAT advertisement in elegant, semi-classical Mandarin. The "Longing" of Durham now stood in complicated relation to the ad copy of Shanghai, text that looked to produce a longing for cigarettes, even as it reflected a longing for profit. The Chinese, it seemed, was a loose translation of the English.

Of all the works on display in Shanghai that afternoon, one spoke most powerfully to the current, and constantly changing, state of affairs in China today. For Window on Pudong, Xu Bing had hired art students to paint the gallery's walls and windows with shadowy monochromatic outlines of what they might have looked out upon when the building was first constructed in 1915, taken from historical photographs. Thus, the iconic millennial skyline across the river could be viewed only through the prism of the modest waterfront from which it had grown. Looking up the Bund, one saw the clock tower of the Peace Hotel through the outline of the same building seven decades earlier. This vista, it seemed, was one of the few in China not to have changed substantially in that time. And yet something was different: From the clock tower now poked a pole, and upon it, per city ordinance, flew the five-star red flag of the People's Republic.