Julie Progin was born and raised in Hong Kong by her Swiss parents before heading to Paris to study textile design at École Duperré, and then to New York to explore product design at Parsons School of Design. After several years working as a store and window display designer, she came back to her Hong Kong roots to launch ceramic and lifestyle brand Latitude 22N and art practice Julie & Jesse with her husband Jesse Mc Lin.
Spending most of her life in Hong Kong has not only taught Julie Progin how to perfectly dodge passers-by on the sidewalk. It has also given her a taste for the eclectic, for patchwork, and for the bits and pieces that make up this incredible city.
She finds inspiration in cultural crossovers to collate and collect the colours and patterns that fuel her thoughts. In her works—including drawings and prints—Julie Progin combines art and design historical references with images of items, motifs and scenes that she has documented in Hong Kong and on her travels, translating the three-dimensional world around her into flat colours and lines.
Julie Progin shares, “I use my work to assimilate ideas, narratives, and aesthetics from a multiplicity of cultures. I mix a lot of disparate elements—patterns, plants, objects, buildings—and visual refer-ences to create each work. However, by shaping relationships between these entities they feel like they belong together rather than being displaced. There is an interaction between the familiar and the unrecognized, which confounds the expectations of the viewers—it takes time observing the works fully to realise the absurdity and the humour I instil in each piece.”
Most of all, Julie Progin is drawn to the history of pattern—how motifs migrate, evolve, and collide—and it is from this materiality that her images emerge.
Julie Progin draws from her own memories of growing up in Hong Kong, her passion for cooking, textiles, ceramics, objects, as well as her interest in the past and the current, the industrial and the handmade, the natural and the man-made.
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