Labor in the Fold

When a work finally enters an exhibition under the artist's name, which gestures does the material preserve from its production, and which labor and names recede into the background along the way?

I. Two Sculpture Educations

She earned her undergraduate degree in sculpture from the Rhode Island School of Design in the United States, then came to Beijing to study in the Sculpture Department at the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA), before returning to the US for a PhD after completing her master's.

This path is more than transnational movement on a résumé. It means entering two distinct bodies of knowledge about sculpture in sequence: one emphasizing studio training, personal language, and the institutions of contemporary art; the other closely tied to China's fine-art-academy system, its public-sculpture tradition, and a long-standing factory-based mode of production. For sculpture, "who teaches you to make" tends to determine "what you count as making": making can mean the artist handling material with her own hands, or it can mean the full chain of modeling, enlarging, mold-making, casting, welding, finishing, coloring, and installation. The former tends to concentrate the work in the artist's own bodily experience, while the latter brings many more people into view, and authorship stops being so simple.

Zhan Wang was an important mentor during Renee Yu Jin's time at CAFA. Zhan Wang's own practice brought mold-making, metalworking, and professional collaboration to the surface of the work early on: a sculpture's final form comes as much from the artist's concept as from the mold, the material, and the fabrication process, which set her asking how the division of labor between artist and craftsperson actually gets organized and narrated. Her doctoral research into Chinese sculpture factories after 1958 can be read as a continuation of that education: the object of study is no longer a particular artist or style, but the production system behind the work that usually never appears intact inside the museum.

II. After a Factory Dissolves

One important subject of Renee Yu Jin's research is the Beijing Sculpture Company, once located near Beijing's Deshengmen and commonly known in the industry as "Beidiao Chang" (the Beijing Sculpture Factory).

After the Beijing Sculpture Factory ceased operations in the 1990s, its workers and craftspeople scattered into sculpture studios and workshops across Beijing and the rest of the country, carrying with them not just an individual livelihood-skill but a whole body of knowledge required to produce large-scale sculpture: how to enlarge a maquette, how to divide it into molds, how to arrange structure for casting, where welding is needed, how to make a work withstand transport, installation, and long-term outdoor display. The factory disappeared, but the production capacity did not. It was broken apart and absorbed into the sculpture industry over the following three decades, becoming a technical network that no longer appears under its original institutional name.

Today, when people encounter a large public sculpture, they usually look first for the artist's name. But the form an artist proposes has to be translated into a series of executable technical judgments that may not come from the artist at all: material thickness, support structure, demolding method, and the placement of weld seams all affect how the work finally holds together, and craftspeople sometimes have to reinterpret a design that is not technically realizable as drawn. Once the work enters an exhibition or art history, though, these judgments are often compressed into a single line, "fabricated by such-and-such factory," or disappear entirely. She has tried to trace how this expertise, following the dispersal of workers after the Beijing Sculpture Factory dissolved, moved into later studios and projects, connecting public works such as the stone balustrades near Tiananmen and the base of the Deng Xiaoping statue on Lotus Hill in Shenzhen to this production lineage.

More important than attributing any single work is the research method she proposes: rather than discussing "Made in China" in the abstract, trace the specific people, units, and processes involved: where people went after a factory closed, how technical skill got re-priced, and what changed in a craftsperson's relationship to the artist once they moved from a state-owned unit into a private studio.

What the factory left behind is not only a body of completed sculptures, but also a set of labor relations that is still operating, even as it becomes harder and harder to recognize as such.

III. Different Authorship Mechanisms on Either Side of the Pacific

Her education in the United States lets her set the history of Chinese sculpture factories alongside a different production lineage.

After the Second World War, American manufacturing and mass consumption expanded rapidly, and standardized materials, modular structures, and industrial fabrication entered art production along with them. Minimalist artists deliberately used industrial materials (steel, aluminum, Plexiglas) and sent part of their work out to be fabricated by specialized factories. Donald Judd's "Specific Objects" was not an operating manual for outsourced fabrication, but it supplied the vocabulary for an object-based way of thinking that no longer depended on traditional sculptural modeling.

In this account, the artist no longer has to complete every step by hand: concept, dimension, material choice, and spatial relationship become the core of authorial work, while the factory is responsible for turning those requirements into a precise object: the artist shifts from maker to the person who sets the rules, chooses among options, and confirms the result. This shift challenges the romantic assumption that a work must come from the artist's own hand, but it does not make the labor question disappear. It only redistributes visibility: the artist's name becomes more concentrated through the identity of conceptual author, while the fabricator's skill becomes institutionalized as a professional service.

Dia Beacon today occupies a converted former Nabisco box-printing plant in upstate New York, and holds a large number of works that only hold together at industrial scale: a space that once served commercial packaging now houses art that deliberately borrows industrial materials and industrial logic. This production chain has continued to expand since: companies such as Urban Art Projects (UAP) can offer artists a full service, from engineering and material testing through fabrication, transport, and installation. A single work might be proposed by an artist in New York, structurally fabricated in Shanghai, and installed on-site by yet another team.

Chinese sculpture factories and the American Minimalist tradition of outsourced fabrication cannot be written as the same story: their institutional backgrounds, positions in art history, and labor protections all differ. But they share a single question: when a work is completed by many hands, why does the art system still tend to organize our understanding of it around one name?

Bronze, wax, and plaster have similar physical properties from one country to the next, but the economic conditions under which they become artworks are not the same: who gets to propose a plan, who owns the material and equipment, who bears the risk, and whose name ends up in the collection record. None of this is decided by the material itself. Bronze is especially good at concealing this: it is bound up with monuments, public authority, and long-term preservation, as if it possessed a natural capacity to outlast time, and the more complete, solid, and permanent a work appears, the more easily the labor traces left by casting and welding vanish from its smooth surface.

IV. Wanxia Is Not a Factory, but Still a Site of Production

Wanxia has no direct institutional connection to the Beijing Sculpture Factory. There is no complete sculpture production line here, nor is it an industrial base known for art fabrication. What Renee Yu Jin came here to do was a residency with a fixed term: live, observe, build relationships, and complete exhibitable work within a limited window of time.

But a residency is also a production system. It dictates when the artist arrives, what space she can use, who she can access, and by when she must show interim results. An open studio looks like a simple exchange event, but it is also the point at which a residency requires the work to move from process into display.

Renee Yu Jin repeatedly mentioned the sense of "folding" that Shenzhen gives her: residential towers grow densely along undulating terrain, elevated roads, surface streets, commercial space, and housing stack layer over layer, and the daily paths of workers eating pig's-trotter rice by the roadside, building cleaning staff, and the urban middle class are all visible to one another without necessarily ever truly crossing.

The residency's title, "Wheels Like Meteors," comes from Wang Jibing's poetry collection Low Flight. Here, "meteor" is not a romantic ascent away from the ground, but something closer to the brief light a laborer gives off while in motion. A delivery rider's wheels, the pushing of cleaning equipment, and the constant running of urban traffic together make up a base layer of labor that is always moving but rarely watched on its own terms.

Renee Yu Jin does not directly represent these scenes of labor, nor does she treat Wanxia's residents as subjects who need the artist to speak for them. The gesture she chose is folding: folding paper boats, stacking paper, bending wire, then handing these provisional forms over to subsequent fabrication.

"Folding," then, is not only an urban metaphor but also a production method. Paper gains structure once folded; wire holds direction once bent; wax retains its indentations once pressure is applied. Every material records a gesture, but their capacity to do so differs: paper can be unfolded again, wax can still be reworked, but once metal is cast, whatever changed in the previous step is fixed in place.

V. Three New Works: How a Gesture Enters the Production Chain

Low Flight begins with wax. Renee Yu Jin shapes a shell of wax directly with her hands: a finger presses down and the surface changes; while the wax has not fully cooled, the form can still be pushed back, pressed down, or readjusted. The work does not begin as the execution of a predetermined drawing, but arises from a continuous sequence of judgments made between hand and material, where it's too thick, where support is needed, which indentation should be kept. Renee Yu Jin cites Richard Sennett's discussion of "revision" in craft: the maker has to keep seeing the result of the previous gesture and decide whether the next step is to preserve it, cancel it out, or start over.

But wax's revisability does not last forever. The wax model still has to go through shelling, dewaxing, metal pouring, welding, and finishing, and it is not currently clear exactly who carries out each step. What can be confirmed is that once the wax form is handed over to casting, the work crosses an important threshold: before this point, the gesture can still be revised; after it, the task is to make the already-confirmed form withstand high heat and structural conversion, until it is finally fixed in brass. The brass surface appears to preserve one person's gesture, but behind it may stand an entire technical chain that is never seen at the same time.

One Stroke Through presents production relations more directly. The four works in the series were made in collaboration with the cleaning staff and friends at the Wanxia Culture and Art Center: participants folded small paper boats together, then stacked them layer upon layer, and a piece of thread that could be bent and held its shape was threaded through them, giving the boats direction and structure; once the form was confirmed, this provisional shape was converted into a metal work.

Folding paper boats has a very low barrier to entry, and the work can easily give a surface impression of equal collaboration. But "everyone folding paper together" describes only one stage of production: who proposed the paper-boat form, who invited the participants, who decided which folded boats to use, these questions don't all have the same answer. The paper boats are made by many hands, but the final metal object still requires the intervention of a professional workshop: the community participants' labor is closely tied to Wanxia and neighborly relations, and so is tellable, while the casting workers' labor is more likely to be filed away as an anonymous technical step. In her own CASTAC article, Renee Yu Jin cites Barthes' and Foucault's discussions of authorship, but the question One Stroke Through actually raises is more specific: when many hands genuinely take part in a work, how should the wall label describe that relationship? How the work will ultimately be credited, and whether participants' names will be listed, remain to be confirmed.

Water Won't Hold a Fold continues the paper-boat imagery. It was shot at Shayuchong, in Shenzhen's Dapeng New District. Renee Yu Jin stands on two paper-boat forms, her body holding a brief balance between water, boat, and ground; the camera captures this gesture, ultimately presented as a lightbox made of a stainless-steel frame and an LED light source. The folds of the paper boats become a visual cue for fragile structure, and the final object's durability comes not from the original gesture, but from the fabrication system that follows it. "Water won't hold a fold," then, is not only about fragility and disappearance: the work itself uses photography and a lightbox to convert a gesture that could never be sustained into an object that can be switched on again and again, transported, and collected.

VI. Which Traces Remain, Which Labor Disappears

Seen together, the three bodies of work show that Renee Yu Jin is concerned not only with how material deforms, but with how production selectively preserves traces. Low Flight fixes the gesture of pressing a wax shell into brass; One Stroke Through converts paper boats folded by many hands into metal; Water Won't Hold a Fold converts a moment of standing by the sea into a continuously glowing image. All three works begin with mutable material or a fleeting gesture and end up in a relatively stable, exhibitable state.

But "the trace is preserved" does not mean "the labor is preserved intact." Brass can reproduce the indentations of wax, but it won't tell a viewer who did the mold-making and finishing; the metal paper boats retain their folds, but list none of the individual folders' names; the lightbox preserves a bodily pose, but compresses the shooting, output, assembly, and maintenance behind what looks like a single complete image. What a work preserves is a selected trace: the artist decides which gestures are worth entering form, the craft process decides which details can be transferred, and the exhibition system decides which names and information enter the public record.

This is also where Renee Yu Jin's own practice genuinely meets her research on sculpture factories: the more complete a work appears, the more likely its production process recedes into the background; the more distinct the artist's personal language becomes, the more easily the collective labor required to realize that language gets understood as a technical service. But pointing out this structure does not mean she stands outside it: One Stroke Through still proceeds from her own project, its participants are organized through the residency relationship, and its subsequent fabrication requires funding and professional resources. She is at once a researcher of labor questions and the person who assigns tasks and holds the right to be credited.

Genuine research into production begins when the hands behind a work are discovered, but it cannot stop at paying tribute to those hands. It also has to ask who holds the power to decide, to name, and to preserve labor.

VII. What Folding Means

The network of craftspeople that dispersed after the Beijing Sculpture Factory dissolved, the professional fabrication system within the American art industry, and the paper boats folded together in a Wanxia residential building should not be flattened into a single, simple globalization story. They resemble each other in form: the artist in every case needs someone else's skill or labor to convert a plan into an exhibitable object, and many participants will never share the artist's public visibility. But the conditions have changed. The Beijing Sculpture Factory's workers once held positions within a state-owned unit's post system, and moved into a more dispersed project network after it dissolved; American professional art-fabrication companies organize technical labor into a high-end service with clear pricing that can be dispatched across borders; the cleaning staff and friends in Wanxia were invited into the early fabrication of the work through the daily contact of a short-term residency. Their relationships to the artist are organized, respectively, by a work unit, a market contract, and residency sociality. Even where the material handled is similar, these cannot be called the same kind of laborer.

"Folding," in Renee Yu Jin's practice, therefore carries two layers of meaning: a real physical gesture (paper pressed into a crease, a wax shell changing shape, thread fixed in place by wax), and also a way for labor to enter the work: different people's contributions get pressed into one unified form, a complex fabrication chain gets folded into a single artist's name, until research or a wall label unfolds one of those layers again.

This residency did not resolve the question of credit and collaboration, nor did it establish a scheme to replace the existing art-production system. But it did bring the factory question Renee Yu Jin has long researched back into her own creative process: when she folds paper alongside cleaning staff, hands a wax shell over to subsequent casting, or installs a beachside gesture into a lightbox, she is no longer only someone who studies production relations, but also the party responsible for initiating, organizing, and signing her name to the work.

The question posed by the Beijing Sculpture Factory has therefore not been shrunk down into a heartwarming story about Wanxia. On the contrary, as the question moves from a factory to a residential building, it becomes more intimate: who took part in the work, who decides when it is finished, whose trace does the material preserve, and whose name gets folded away along with the production process? Bronze, wax, and paper will not answer these questions. They only preserve the place where an answer once passed through.

Jin Yu, Flying Low II, 2026, ceramic and brass, 23 × 22 × 26 cm. Image courtesy of the artist

Jin Yu, In Passing I, 2026, brass, 12 × 10 × 64 cm, edition of 3 + 1 AP. Image courtesy of the artist

Jin Yu, In Passing II, 2026, brass, 16 × 8 × 17 cm, edition of 3 + 1 AP. Image courtesy of the artist

Jin Yu, In Passing III, 2026, brass, 16 × 8 × 17 cm, edition of 3 + 1 AP. Image courtesy of the artist

Jin Yu, Water Keeps No Crease, 2026, lightbox, transparency film, stainless-steel frame, LED light source, and acrylic light-diffusing panel, 50 × 50 × 10 cm, edition of 3 + 1 AP. Image courtesy of the artist.

Jin Yu, Stars, Landed III, 2026, ceramic and electroformed fruit seeds, pits, and peels, 32 × 27 × 4 cm. Image courtesy of the artist

in Yu, Sights, 2026, ceramic and fresh flowers, dimensions variable. Image courtesy of the artist

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