Hanging Out depicts common household goods—from brooms to baskets, stools to shopping trolleys—arranged in a composition echoing the excessively meticulous wan hua dui (ten thousand flowers piled up or mille-fleurs) designs traditionally painted onto the glazed surface of porcelain vessels as well as the clutter of Hong Kong’s traditional shops where old-fashioned crockery, furniture and various homewares cover every inch of the shop from floor to ceiling.

Common in Hong Kong before the 1970s, these neighbourhood homeware shops started closing one by one as supermarkets, department stores, dollar shops, convenient store chains, began to burgeon all over the city. These treasure troves where you can find anything from plungers to teapots, handmade bamboo baskets dangling from the ceiling and buckets tucked away in corners have become rare finds.

Julie Progin shares, “I am inspired by these old-school stores where the owners find ingenious solutions to display as much commodities as they can in their tiny ground floor spaces. When you enter the shops, it feels like you’ve discovered a cave of wonders. Every inch is filled with products for sale. The art of stacking, hanging, strapping objects together as a space-saving technique produces beautiful patterns and systems that remind me of the thousand flowers designs where no space is left unfilled. They also carry products that nobody else sells. To compete with larger chain stores they appeal to customers with handmade goods or commodities that hark back to a bygone era like vintage thermal flasks or the iconic tin mailboxes that I grew up seeing all over Hong Kong.”

Hanging Out celebrates the unique character and resilience of these shops where Julie Progin enjoys spending time searching for unique products that are hard to find elsewhere.