Touch to Make: An Index Finger’s Path into the Sculpture Factories in China

12/12/2025

Listen "Touch to Make: An Index Finger’s Path into the Sculpture Factories in China"

Episode Synopsis


This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Renee Yu Jin can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2025/12/touch-to-make-an-index-fingers-path-into-the-sculpture-factories-in-china/. About the post: How do digital platforms reconfigure the ways we come to know sites of artistic labor before we ever enter the workshops? What began as a simple search for sculpture factories near Beijing became an encounter with how algorithmic recommendation, platform aesthetics, and factory self-promotion organize visibility for contemporary sculpture production. As clips foreground technological capability and optimized workflows while workers remain partially obscured, a layered form of mediation emerges, one that frames the factory as a digital formation long before it becomes a physical place. Tracing how my own scrolling shaped this encounter, this piece examines how touch, vision, and labor move across screens and shop floors, revealing how digital circulation both illuminates and abstracts the embodied work of sculpture making in China.

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