In Jingdezhen, the Chinese city built on kaolin-rich soil and, in the Imperial era, home to one of the most prolific and renowned furnaces in the country, the past is a presence that you can touch. You can even trip over it, walking through the streets that today, like hundreds of years ago, are swarming with life and trade, as it is not unusual to come across the remains of abandoned ancient workshops or broken vases and pots dating back to who knows when.
When Julie Progin and Jesse Mc Lin, the two founders of the studio Julie & Jesse, saw for themselves a piece from that which even UNESCO has recognised as the world capital of porcelain for the very first time – a Song dynasty plate at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, they were so impressed that they decided to seek inspiration for their first collection in the East. Progin, a designer of Swiss origin, and Mc Lin, a ceramist born in Colorado, met at the Parsons School of Design in New York and opened their first workshop in Brooklyn with little conviction: “It seemed like all new graduates had to set up a ceramics studio, and that’s what we did,”Jesse tells. “But having made prototypes of our first works, we quickly realised that the United States didn’t offer us the chance to actually start producing.”
And so in 2007 they moved to Hong Kong, where Julie Progin had already spent part of her childhood following her father, a watchmaker, and in 2008 they opened a second studio, which was then closed in early 2020 just before the pandemic broke out, right in Jingdezhen, which seemed to both of them to be a kind of ‘mecca’ by virtue of its history and the variety of techniques used by the local master ceramists. “It’s hard not to come across history in this Chinese capital of porcelain, you just have to kick a pile of litter and a thousand-year-old piece might roll out,” the designers explain. Since then, Julie & Jesse have been pushing their favourite material to the limit with bold experiments that, while keeping their roots firmly planted in tradition, tend to upturn the traditional image of porcelain, half-way between craftsmanship, art and design. With their adventurous extrusions and appearance apparently balancing between the two states of solid and liquid, the pieces they create – usually unique or part of small series – strike the eye as unidentified ceramic objects.
Fragment(s), the Bottle Edition, one of the recent collections, presented to the public at the Milan design week last April as part of a personal exhibition curated by Annalisa Rosso and Elisa Mencarelli, took its cue from the discovery of some moulds in poor state found in a factory in Jingdezhen specialised in the production of ceramic bottles. Abandoned hastily by the people that ran it along with all its contents, the factory was due to be demolished to make way for new buildings, as often happens in Chinese cities looking to the future where buildings, and sometimes even neighbourhoods, have a very short life cycle. With repeated – and deliberate – use of these already cracked moulds to produce new pieces, the crack progressively widened to leave an increasingly large amount of raw material ‘escape’ during firing. Progin and Mc Lin thus created a series of unique objects, all different from each other, characterised by increasingly visible lumps and greater deviations from the original bottle shape.
“We never know in advance how many pieces we will be able to create before the mould breaks completely, it may be twenty or fifty,” Julie Progin explains. “What we are most interested in is the relationship between uniqueness and mass production, and showing that even an industrial process, repetitive by nature, can generate something unique,” Jesse Mc Lin continues. “Much of our work revolves precisely around this idea, looking at industry and serial production in a unique manner. The mistake, but also the natural deterioration of things, which are usually seen as something negative, can in fact represent opportunities to be reaped.”
Overturning ceramic stereotypes is something that Julie & Jesse have been putting into practice constantly and methodically since the very beginning. In Déshabillé, a project from the late 2010s, the two artists deconstructed the idea of traditional porcelain glazed with bright colours, and were able to ‘strip’ the vases, removing the glaze from the upper part, working it as a relief decoration or kind of lace. “We wanted to think about how to transform the glaze, usually considered a simple decoration, into an authentic design element. This work captures the moment in which the vitreous matter moves around the object during firing, fluctuating in the air like a skirt moved by the wind or a sleeve lifted up to reveal the bare skin of the person wearing it,” Progin recalls. In Without leaving your room, a more recent series, this vitreous matter, no longer obliged to stick to the vases it covers, forms expanses of trees and stylised landscapes.
The fact of have two different learning experiences behind them – Jesse Mc Lin’s more academic and linked to art, his companion in life and in work trained in design – and geographically distant origins naturally drove the pair to seek points of contact between different ceramic worlds and traditions. “We have always been fascinated by the global history of this material and the way in which the techniques, forms and patterns have moved between the continents,” McLin explains. “In some way it is a universal language, with a common guiding thread that we can all recognise and that speaks to us, but there are also aspects of uniqueness, specific to each culture. Since we moved to Hong Kong, we have intensified our research into Chinese ceramics and realised that what could seem a local history is actually a global matter, with repercussions on the whole world, as Jingdezhen porcelain has been exported to very many different countries.”
