Cover Carlos Koo is a Hong Kong-based watch engraver and collector (Photo: courtesy of Tatler Hong Kong / Hungmc)
Carlos Koo is a Hong Kong-based watch engraver and collector (Photo: courtesy of Tatler Hong Kong / Hungmc)
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Carlos Koo started engraving Harley-Davidsons because nobody in Hong Kong would do it for him. Eleven years and one engraved Omega later, he engraves watches for enthusiasts from Dubai to Düsseldorf—but he isn’t satisfied with his work yet
Carlos Koo will tell you very frankly that he does not have an art-school background; and yet, he is an in-demand artist. He learnt to engrave by watching YouTube videos at home during the Covid lockdown, working a needle the thickness of a fingernail under a microscope, zooming in on a watch that had cost him a year’s worth of savings. “I struggled a lot for a couple of days, and I was still getting nowhere,” he tells Tatler. “I was thinking of quitting. It’s so hard, and no one [was] telling me what to do next.”
What stopped him was how much he had already spent on tools. “I was like, OK, don’t think about quitting, because that cost me a lot of money. I really have to get it done.”
That watch was his Omega Seamaster, bought at a discount through a brand contact when he was still building a name as an actor and model in Hong Kong. It was his second canvas; before the watch there was a Harley-Davidson. Koo, who has been riding now for two decades, decided in 2015 that he wanted custom engraving on his bike. But the artists he found in Japan, China, Thailand and the US were slow to answer and unwilling to deviate from his designs. So he learnt the craft himself, practising first on his own motorcycle grips, the coverings on the handlebars. For two years, he experimented, using a rotary Dremel tool—but he wasn’t happy with the results.
Above Koo is a self taught watch engraver and lover (Photo: courtesy of Tatler Hong Kong / Hungmc)
Koo is a self taught watch engraver and lover (Photo: courtesy of Tatler Hong Kong / Hungmc)
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He had also been following a Balinese master engraver on Facebook for years, watching his videos and studying the man’s hammer-and-chisel technique.
In 2018, he combined a holiday to Bali with a visit to the master’s workshop. “The way he taught me how to cut the metal, how to hold the hammer—it just [changed me] as a person,” Koo says. The experience was transformative. While Koo ultimately found the master’s method physically punishing—the technique strained his fingers and hurt his back—he grafted what he’d learnt onto the western engraving style, blending its advantages with his own hammering instincts to arrive at a technique entirely his own.
The leap from motorcycle steel to watch cases came when the Harley riders he had been engraving for—a small but loyal clientele built up over years of word-of-mouth recommendations among Hong Kong’s biking community—began asking if he could do the same for their wrists. The theory of cutting metal is the same whether you’re working on a tank or a dial, he reasoned; you simply scale everything down. He looked into the possibility of moving from handlebars to timepieces and discovered that the tools alone— microscope; air graver, a handheld pneumatic tool used to engrave; a full set of chisels—would cost close to HK$100,000, roughly the price of another luxury watch.
“As a watch lover myself, how do I spend this money [on the tools and not] buy another watch [instead]?” he says. He bought them anyway, and taught himself the scaled-down technique: same hammer-and-chisel logic, same reading of the metal’s grain, but now conducted under magnification, on a surface the size of a thumbnail. He got to work on his own Omega, then showed it to potential clients expecting commissions. He got nothing.
Above Koo’s Seiko watches (Photo: courtesy of Tatler Hong Kong / Hungmc)
Koo’s Seiko watches (Photo: courtesy of Tatler Hong Kong / Hungmc)
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It was an IWC Big Pilot that changed things. He bought it in 2008 but only engraved it in 2023. Koo chose to create an aviator’s sky, engraving the dial with the sun, moon and stars. “I’ve been searching on the internet for years, seeing how people engrave their watches. I never see people doing this kind of [work],” he says of his decision to put the idea of celestial navigation onto a pilot watch. The orders that followed came from Dubai, the US, the UK and Germany, alongside magazine coverage in Hong Kong and the Middle East—recognition that is still difficult to fathom.
There is a useful detail buried in how Koo describes wearing his own work: he owns ten watches, but on the days he has events, interviews or anything resembling work, only one is eligible. “The only one I can wear is the engraved one,” he says—not out of vanity, but because the carved dial is itself a conversation starter and a portfolio piece in one. A plain Rolex on his wrist draws no questions; an engraved one draws all of them.
His own watch collection traces a fairly classic arc before it turns idiosyncratic. A Rolex Submariner came first, bought at cost from a close friend who refused to mark up the price while reselling the watch to him. The now-engraved Omega followed, chosen for an orange bezel and orange index that stood out compared to the black, white and silver dive watches dominating the market two decades ago.
The third core piece breaks from the Rolex-Omega-IWC trajectory of obvious status watches: a Sinn Spezialuhren, bought roughly 15 years ago, chosen specifically because it could survive a motorcycle ride, a hike, a cave, a dive, without ever coming off his wrist. “I really wanted to have a buddy, like [an extension] of my body,” he says. “I don’t want to take it off.” Its GMT function made it a natural travel companion—Koo was f lying frequently for modelling and acting work—and its matte black case kept a low profile in places where a shinier watch might attract the wrong attention. The Sinn has been on his wrist so consistently for 15 years that its coating has worn through in places, but Koo doesn’t see that as a problem. “It’s grown [old] with me,” he says.
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Above Omega Seamaster Planet Ocean chronograph (Photo: courtesy of Tatler Hong Kong / Hungmc)
Omega Seamaster Planet Ocean chronograph (Photo: courtesy of Tatler Hong Kong / Hungmc)
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Koo’s collecting paused for seven years after he got married and his wife had a child; it resumed only in the past year, with a King Seiko. What he wants next is a Panerai with a cushion case—not to wear, but to engrave. “Now I have a very bad habit,” he says. “Every time I see a watch, I [keep] thinking how it [would] look after I [engrave] it.”
Koo’s engraving business has, in three years, expanded well beyond watches into art. He now also works in copper plate relief, and last year held his first solo exhibition; his work sold well, to collectors he had never met, strangers who found his work online. Art Central followed, and with it, enquiries from gallery partners in New York and London. The watch commissions and the art sales draw from different pools: the former tend to come from enthusiast communities in Dubai, the US, the UK and Germany; the latter from a broader art-collector base spanning Germany, Poland, the UK, the US, Singapore and mainland China.
All of it, he says, is still difficult to square with a man who got into the craft because, 11 years ago, he simply could not find anyone in Hong Kong willing to engrave his motorcycle.
Above The engraved IWC Big Pilot (Photo: courtesy of Tatler Hong Kong / Hungmc)
The engraved IWC Big Pilot (Photo: courtesy of Tatler Hong Kong / Hungmc)
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His next goal is to learn relief sculpture—specifically the Russian school practised in St Petersburg. Carlos Koo’s current engraving style is incised: he cuts into the metal, working in two dimensions, creating depth across recessed lines. Relief sculpture inverts that, with masters using a convex, three-dimensional technique that raises the design and builds forms above the surface of the metal. He has watched Russian masters do this on larger objects like pocketknife handles and decorative plates, but he wants to bring this technique to watch dials, something he doesn’t believe anyone else has tried yet. A trip to St Petersburg to study in person is on the cards, but not yet booked; his son is six, the world is complicated, and besides, he says, there is no shortage of work in the meantime.
Ask him if he is happy with his work and the answer comes without hesitation. “I would say no. I need to keep that mentality, that attitude, that no matter what I do, [I’m never fully satisfied]. If I’m happy with what I have, I’m gonna stay there [at the same level] forever, or even [deteriorate].” It is, he says, the only attitude that has ever moved him forward—from a Harley grip to an IWC Schaffhausen dial to a gallery wall.
As the Regional Editor for Watches and Jewellery and Editorial Content Lead for Tatler GMT, Amrita Katara specialises in luxury watch and jewellery coverage across Asia, with expertise in editorial strategy, feature writing and interviews with industry leaders. Her past roles span luxury lifestyle media and client partnerships. Based in Mumbai, Amrita’s work bridges global trends and Asian market insights.
