After years spent collecting expensive camera lenses, Chi Hang Wong graduated to mechanical movements
It’s 2019 and nearly six months of anti-government protests have rocked Hong Kong, with police arresting thousands of people. Chi Hang Wong is at home, depressed, browsing the internet, when he discovers the work of LA-based artist Cleon Peterson, whose chaotic paintings show clashing figures as they struggle between power and submission.
“His work spoke to me,” Wong, 31, tells me. Inescapably eccentric, he’s wearing retro, round glasses and a buttoned-up shirt. “A lot of Cleon’s work is painted in black and white and, because of what was happening in Hong Kong, it really hit home.”
As fate would have it, Wong received an Instagram message from the artist several weeks later concerning a Rolex Day-Date President about which he’d posted. Wong had two editions in yellow gold, one with an onyx dial, the other with a lapis dial.
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Wong flew to LA to meet Peterson and tour his studio. “I took the Rolex off my wrist and handed it to him the moment we met,” he says. “I said to him, ‘Your artwork got me through a really difficult time when I was depressed. This watch is just a watch to me, but your artwork gave me something that’s priceless.’”
Wong, who is better known to just about everyone as “B”, describes himself as a “born collector”. As a teenager, he started amassing rare clothing, designer sunglasses and antique cameras. In 2005 he moved to Canada where he studied psychology at the University of Toronto.
“When I was a kid, I wanted to be a scientist. I became obsessed with perpetual motion and mechanics that work without external power.”
He started reading about watches and now owns about 30. “My collection is unusual,” he warns me, as he pulls a Retro Fantasy Mickey Mouse by Gérald Genta from his leather briefcase. “When I first started collecting, my friends were mostly into fashion brands and fancy Apple watches. Scratch that: we didn’t even have those back then. They were into those GPS running watches.” He rolls his eyes and winks.
When Wong returned to Hong Kong from boarding school in Ipswich, England, his mother gifted him a watch during a family dinner.
“It had a blue strap and a Donald Duck on it. I was like, ‘What the hell? What even is this? I don’t want a cartoon watch. Do you want me to get bullied at school? If I wear this, they’ll kill me!’ Back then, to be cool you had to wear Quicksilver and put gel in your hair, you know? All I wanted was a Casio G-Shock.”
