In this story from the Design Anthology print archive, we visit Latitude 22N in their Hong Kong ceramics workshop and artist studio

This story originally appeared in Design Anthology Asia issue 9

Julie Progin and Jesse Mc Lin met at Parsons School of Design in New York City. She was a Swiss girl from Hong Kong, he’d grown up among the redwood trees of Northern California. She was a student, he was a teacher — but no, they laugh graciously, not her teacher.

The couple opened their first ceramics studio in New York and grappled with the challenges of working in an ‘old and oversaturated’ market before moving to Asia. In 2008 they set up shop in Hong Kong, naming their new studio for its terrestrial coordinates: Latitude 22N. It’s an ‘exciting and inspirational’ place, says Mc Lin, where the limits of design are ‘growing, changing and shifting constantly’; it also allows them to explore the rich history of ceramics throughout China, Japan and Southeast Asia.

Working under the Latitude label, Progin and Mc Lin create thoughtful dinnerware, home decor and lighting for sale through the brand’s online shop or their studio. They also take on bespoke projects for hotel and restaurant clients. Their Tribute Hotels x Latitude collection, for example, was an homage to the Kowloon neighbourhood of Yau Ma Tei, with clean geometric designs inspired by the floor tiles, punched gates and window grilles of the area’s 1970s buildings.

A diversity of interests marks the pair’s creative outlook. Mc Lin says, ‘Latitude is quite a beautiful concept: a line that goes all the way around the world to come back to itself, so it’s complete, and in that process it covers all cultures.’ Progin adds that, increasingly, ‘People want to know there’s a person behind a product and what the story is, and to connect with something through the design.’

They benefit from skills that complement one another, and from a strong and cultivated understanding of their materials.Progin’s education in textiles lends her facility with patterns. She’s also the practical one. Mc Lin, with his fine art background, is more interested in the conceptual side and shapes. He prefers to experiment directly with clay rather than sit at the computer: ‘It’s a lot of getting dirty and making, and just seeing what works and what doesn’t.’

Part of Progin and Mc Lin’s original mission in coming to Hong Kong was to explore the current state of China’s ancient ceramic traditions. To that end, they would spend several months out of the year in Jingdezhen, the ‘Porcelain Capital’, in Jiangxi province.

It was there that the duo, who also work as artists under their Julie & Jesse label, first encountered the remains of massive, discarded plaster moulds that had been used to make large, traditional vases. ‘Behind a lot of factories in Jingdezhen, there were huge landscapes of waste moulds,’ recalls Mc Lin. ‘After a few years of walking by these every day, we started collecting them and piecing them back together.’ The work became a process of archiving the city — of capturing a precise moment of Jingdezhen’s, and on a larger scale modern China’s, development. ‘Part of the country’s economic growth is the waste of mass production,’ he observes. ‘Many of the factories where these fragments came from are now gone, bulldozed to make way for high-rises.’

Julie & Jesse’s resulting Fragments series was exhibited in Beijing’s Caochangdi in 2012, and a few of the pieces have been acquired by Hong Kong’s M+ museum. The project is a striking example of where art, design and craftsmanship meet. ‘Where we exist is somewhere between it all,’ says Mc Lin.

Text / Samantha Leese