From historical site to art museum: Xu Bing's Tobacco Projects Durham and Virginia

Examining the development of Xu Bing's Tobacco Project from its first to its third iteration, I argue that in addition to changes in the work itself, the installation's changing display spaces have influenced scholarly and critical interpretation of its core message. In published responses to this project, scholars have extracted a variety of meanings from the displays. They have moved from interpreting Xu's work as a passionate stand against the tobacco industry, framed by his father's untimely death from lung cancer, to an ambiguous installation that explores both positive economic benefits and negative health effects of tobacco. I argue that changes to this discourse were heightened as critics and scholars responded to Tobacco Project's interaction with the established narratives of the spaces in which the project was displayed. To focus my study, I concentrate on the differences between the Tobacco Museum and Duke Homestead in Durham, North Carolina, where Xu first installed a portion of his work, and the Virginia Museum of fine arts in Richmond, where Xu displayed his third project. Using the field of critical museum studies as a guide, I explore the differences between a museum dedicated to a positive tobacco history and a public fine arts museum that may have affected Tobacco Project's own narratives. I conclude that space has played an inextricable role in the presentation and reception of Xu Bing's Tobacco Project