Renee Yu Jin

Since the 1980s, China has been mythologized as the “workshop of the world.” Yet beyond its assembly lines lie thousands of sculpture factories where art and industry converge. This dissertation traces transformations of art and labor in the shaping of public space across China’s socialist and post-reform eras to the present. Combining ethnography, oral history, archival research, visual analysis, and creative methods, it reveals how marginalized workers’ collective labor is obscured and recast as creativity and progress within both national and transnational art economies. Through a collaborative artist book developed with factory workers, the project redefines ethnography as a creative and ethical inquiry that makes visible the collective labor sustaining global cultural production.