Yu Jin

EDIT China has been considered the “factory of the world” since the 1980s. As contemporary Chinese art and real estate speculation have emerged as domestic and global phenomena, the employment of migrant workers, craftspeople, and fabricators to produce monumental artworks on the shop floor has become widespread. This ethnographic research focuses on production processes within sculpture factories located in Beijing’s peripheral zones. These factories—where state ideologies, religious iconographies, and neoliberal urban imaginaries are materially forged—serve as critical sites for analyzing the dialectics of artistic praxis under state capitalism but remain absent largely from dominant critiques of “Made in China.” In this context, the project explores the following questions: How has China’s transition from state socialism to a market economy shaped everyday artistic labor in sculpture factories? How do networks of artists, workers, and intermediaries mediate aesthetic decisions and notions of value? And how have emerging digital tools (re)configured the transmission of craft knowledge within sculpture factories? By bridging scholarship in anthropology, labor studies, and art history, this project takes an expansive view of value and examines how profit is extracted from classed, racialized, and gendered bodies in the service of creativity.