Hong Kong Ceramic Experimentation Goes to Milan

There was a particularly special exhibition at this year’s annual Salone del Mobile, the world’s largest global design and furniture show, which is held every April in Milan. Hong Kong ceramics design studio Julie & Jesse, made up of Swiss designer Julie Progin and American artist Jesse McLin, presented Metamorphism, featuring some of their most striking experimentation with porcelain and the processes through which it is made. 

Working out of their Chai Wan studio on the far eastern side of Hong Kong Island, Progin and McLin — who also work on a line of functional ceramics called Latitude 22N — have long been investigating the rhythms of porcelain making through a very thorough approach that de-structures the methods linked to mass production in order to find unicity and inner meaning in their favourite medium. 

Their show in Milan was held as part of the Off Salon series of artistic installations, made possible by the curator duo Annalisa Rosso and Elisa Mencarelli. They first encountered the artists’ work at M+ and say they were immediately struck by the “depth and originality” of their approach. Ceramics, and porcelain in particular, lend themselves particularly well to artistic research. Ceramics have high plasticity and a somewhat capricious nature, along with a strong “clay memory,” meaning that a piece of clay tends to go back to the first form it has been moulded into and can easily collapse if the walls are not perfectly uniform in thickness. McLin describes the process as “looking at heat, pressure, and water through a different perspective, with the help of found tools and the exploration of mistakes.” 

Julie & Jesse’s artistic practice has been exploring and interrogating some of the centuries-old techniques used in Jingdezhen, China’s porcelain capital since at least the Song Dynasty (960–1279), pushing the boundaries of experimentation to its very end. Some of their signature works, in a series called Fragments, are cast in broken and discarded plaster moulds that had been employed by a Jingdezhen porcelain factory to make ceramic bottles, which they found in one of their many sojourns in the ceramics city. 

To make the pieces, they reutilise the same mould, pouring in liquidised porcelain — made by dissolving porcelain clay into water until it becomes a thick paste — and letting it dry. Once the porcelain is set, they open the plaster mould, but do not polish the parts that have seeped into cracks in the plaster, in order to record the deterioration of the mould. Successive casts result in more and more damage to the mould, producing porcelain bottles progressively more distorted by the porcelain paste leaking into the fissures of the mould, until the mould becomes unusable. 

“We selected moulds that were already broken, but with one half still intact,” says Progin, “and kept using it until the porcelain slip would no longer be retained by the mould.” They started this exploration in 2011 and still find it an inspiring way to work. “The erosion of the mould is really about the passing of time,” says Progin. “But also the way in which each mould will be eroded in a different way,” adds McLin. 

Another of their signature explorations, called Without Leaving Your Room, which they started in 2019, is a process through which the glaze that is applied to the surface of the porcelain work before its final firing is allowed to flow outwards from the pot. They fire the pots upside down, placing them in a ceramic fibre wool container called kaol blanket — to insulate it — and filling it with alumina sand, which has a very high melting point. “As the glaze melts, it runs out into the sand, producing unexpected results,” says McLin. 

The pots that have been fired using this very innovative method look as if they were wearing high-fashion collars that expand outward in an embroidery-like gauze. In other instances, it’s as if the glaze has turned into a sudden wave that breaks into the air. In pieces where the glaze has melted in thicker layers, the effect is akin to a Chinese landscape painting, with clouds and treetops and foliage literally melting into one. “They are extremely fragile,” says McLin. “But when we dig in the sand to see what the final result is like, it is always a moment of excitement and discovery.”

The name of this series comes from a poem by 11th century Chinese poet and painter Guo Xi, who wrote about looking at landscape paintings: “Without leaving your room, you may sit to your heart’s content among streams and valleys.” Here, “without leaving the room,” we can contemplate these rivulets of vitrified and solidified glaze, allowing our imagination to see in them as many landscapes, explosions, trees or mountains as we see fit. It is very much like the way Chinese literati would favour strange natural rock formations, Scholar’s Rocks (gung1 sek6 供石), staring at them for hours on end and finding shapes and forms to which they may dedicate poems or short stories. 

This detailed approach to investigate, and stretch, traditional shapes is precisely what attracted Rosso and Mencarelli to Julie & Jessie’s work. “The more we explored their work, the more we appreciated it,” says Rosso. “Their research is anything but obvious – especially considering the material they work with, ceramic, which many believe they already understand fully. Yet, in the hands of Julie & Jesse, it becomes something entirely unexpected. Their pieces manage to shift our perception, offering a fresh, almost radical perspective on a medium often taken for granted.”

Once McLin and Progin set their minds to it, the possibility for exploration, deconstruction and unexpected openings are seemingly endless. A new series of works called Homonyms makes use of the porcelain rim that remains once the porcelain cast is poured into the mould. This is a simple ring of clay that sits at the opening of the mould, which is normally allowed to dry out before being cut away with a pottery knife, then discarded. (It is often recycled, after mixing it with water and sifting it, in order to eliminate any bit of plaster that may have stuck to the slip.) Instead, in the Homonyms series, these round porcelain forms are used as decorative add-ons, attached to the upper part of the pots, adding decorative twirls and circles and extensions, further interrogating the material and techniques used in making porcelain. 

This level of reflection and research would be enough on its own – but the results are also visually stunning, which feels like a bonus in a body of work that is already emotionally and intellectually stimulating. The Homonyms works, which range in size, are always paired two by two and they are mostly coasted in a transparent glaze, exalting the whiteness of the porcelain, or in a pale ostrich-shell yellow glaze, which brings to mind something from an antique shop, like old ivory or an oddity that could have been found in a cabinet of curiosities from the Renaissance. The decorative additions on the tops of the vases are inspired by Beijing Opera’s costumes, says Progin, and the more you look at them, the more you start to intercept fantastic headgear and hairstyles, like those sported by Chinese opera singers. 

The pull and push of “uniqueness versus mass production,” as Progin puts it, is something that has become a dominant theme in Julie & Jesse’s artistic exploration in ceramics also through their intimate relationship with Jingdezhen – a city that, after having produced porcelain exclusively for the imperial court in both the Ming (1368–1644) and Qing (1644–1911) dynasties, became the prime site of mass production of all types of functional wares, but also of Karl Marx and Mao Zedong statues and commemorative plaques with Mao’s portrait and sayings painted on them. 

As the economic shifts that have characterized Chinese manufacture in past few decades affected the way in which porcelain was produced in Jingdezhen, Progin and McLin found themselves reflecting on the significance of these shifts. “It used to be that everything this city produced was quite fragmented,” says McLin. “Oone person would make the moulds, another runs the kiln and so on. Now there is more and more all in-house production, and this shift, too, shows a mentality that is constantly reinvented and reformatted.” 

This dynamic is only bound to become even more intricate and unpredictable, as AI meets craft, opening the door to unexpected developments – which will no doubt trigger this Hong Kong’s creative duo’s imagination to further innovative explorations.  

Their show in Milan was held as part of the Off Salon series of artistic installations, made possible by the curator duo Annalisa Rosso and Elisa Mencarelli and produced by 5VIE.

Photos in slider are by Amir Farzad, Courtesy 5VIE, Onn Sek for Zolima CityMag.