Virginia's Slim Pickings for Smokes

Xu Bing, one of China's best-known contemporary artists, didn't think it would be hard to get materials for an exhibit about tobacco in a city whose ties to the leaf run long and deep.

His installation opened over the weekend at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. It explores the history, culture, and links between the tobacco industries in the U.S. and China. Mr. Xu was optimistic about finding 500,000 cigarettes for a 40-by-15 foot "Tiger Carpet"; a 40-foot-long uncut cigarette to be stretched—and burned—across the length of a reproduction of an ancient Chinese scroll; and 440 pounds of tobacco leaves compressed into a cube, with raised letters reading, "Light as Smoke."

But getting materials wasn't easy, even in a city so steeped in tobacco it once had an annual festival and Tobacco Bowl. Mr. Xu says the complications he faced reflect the very point of his Tobacco Project: to explore the entangled, contradictory relationship people have with one of the world's most widely cultivated nonfood crops, an economic engine that the World Health Organization links to the deaths of more than five million people a year.

"There's both a closeness and a distance," says Mr. Xu, a 1999 recipient of a MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant who has lived and worked both in the U.S. and China and who currently has an installation in New York made from 9/11 dust.

Altria Group Inc., Richmond-based parent company of Philip Morris USA and a major corporate donor to the VMFA, declined to donate cigarettes or other tobacco materials, according to Mr. Xu and museum staff. Altria has committed more than $1 million through 2013 to sponsor museum exhibits, including a recent successful Picasso show, but "we don't support every exhibit that comes to the museum," an Altria spokesman says.