Meet the artists remoulding the rules of working with clay

South China Morning Post

2 days ago

In Hong Kong, no studio bends the rules of clay quite like the one
Julie Progin and Jesse Mc Lin have built in Chai Wan. Inside the 3,500 sq ft industrial warehouse, some vases appear to ooze frozen liquid; others erupt in otherworldly forms – futuristic landscapes in shades of blue, grey and violet. Elsewhere, perforated surfaces mimic coral or scholar rocks, emerging from a sea of porcelain.
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Progin and Mc Lin met in New York and launched their first ceramics brand, Latitude 22N, in Brooklyn. By 2007, they'd relocated it to Hong Kong, where Progin grew up, and in 2008 opened a second studio in
Jingdezhen, the porcelain capital of China , in Jiangxi province.
What began as a pragmatic design practice soon shifted to something less easily defined, as the couple discovered while preparing for their first solo exhibition, 'Fragment(s), The Poetics of Decay'. Since a piece from that collection was acquired by
M+ in 2013, the duo's work has continued to edge towards fine art, blurring the line between craft, object and sculpture, most recently in 'Metamorphism', a show presented during Milan Design Week 2025 in April.
A piece from Julie Progin and Jesse Mc Lin Homonyms series. Photo: Jocelyn Tam
'To survive creatively in Hong Kong, which can be difficult, the more flexible you are, the better,' says Mc Lin. We're standing in what he calls their 'hang test space', a white-walled enclave within the studio where pieces are pulled out of the visual chaos and held to the light. 'You need to take the work out of a distracting space and ask: could it change? Could it develop? Could it be better?'
Behind a set of wide sliding doors, the studio opens into the heart of their practice: a space where much of the experimenting and creation happens. Two kilns anchor one corner. A large table is strewn with moulds and tools. Off to the side, fragments of ceramics, minerals and rocks they've collected over the years form a kind of private reference library.
It became about creating a kind of memory
Julie Progin
They are known for experimenting with porcelain's intrinsic qualities in ways that aren't typically visible in the mainstream, challenging conventional depictions. In 'Fragments', Progin and Mc Lin use broken and eroded moulds to craft large, distorted vases that explore how uniqueness can be achieved through mass production. In their 'Clay Bodies' series, they use high temperatures, encouraging the clay to collapse in the kiln, emphasising its tendency towards instability and transformation.
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