Oh Snap!

After years spent collecting expensive camera lenses, Chi Hang Wong graduated to mechanical movements

- Annie Darling

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.