Xu Bing, one of China’s most renown contemporary artists, has created a unique tiger rug from 500,000 cigarettes. And it looks smoking.

A real tiger rug is a rare thing to have, but rarer still is one made from hundreds of thousands of tobacco cigarettes. Weighing an impressive 440 pounds, this cigarette rug has to be one of the largest tobacco-inspired art installations in history. It was created by a group of artists by stacking hundreds of thousands of cigarettes on their ends, in the shape of a tiger pattern rug. The unique work of art will be on display at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, through December 4, 2011, and will be moved to the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, in January 2012.

The cigarette tiger rug is just one of the many tobacco-related artworks in Xu Bing’s latest collection, which explores themes from global trade, marketing and packaging of on of the world’s most controversial commodities. In fact, the famous Chinese artist has found inspiration in the tobacco industry for the last 10 years.

Photos courtesy of  Virginia Museum of Fine Arts via Inhabitat