Ashmolean Eastern Art Online, Yousef Jameel Centre for Islamic and Asian Art

Changbai in the far northeast is one of China’s main forest regions. Xu Bing went there on a trip organised by the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, and this drawing ‘at the East is Red forestry department timber yard and mill’ was amongst those submitted in his final degree project. He has used various erasure techniques, and the composition is more pictorial than in other drawings of this period. The repetitions anticipate aspects of his later landscape work.