RIDGEFIELD, CT.- Xu Bing: Tobacco Project explores the production and culture of tobacco as seen through the eyes of one of China’s most ground-breaking contemporary artists. Organized by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, the exhibition’s only venue in the New York Metropolitan area is at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, on view from January 29 to June 10, 2012. In 1995 Xu Bing was invited to visit Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. Exploring the area, he visited the Duke Homestead and Tobacco Museum, tobacco farms, and a former cigarette factory, experiences that planted the seeds for a body of work that now spans more than a decade. A prolific artist, Xu Bing’s interest in language has manifested itself in work that is strongly conceptual in nature, and this exhibition’s use of research, archival materials, and text points to the artist’s idea-driven methodology.