Watch This Space

After a two-year delay, the Patek Philippe Watch Art Grand Exhibition finally arrived in Tokyo, showcasing more than 500 watches and objets—and Taller was there at the opening of this highly anticipated exhibition

- Aun Koh

Watch enthusiasts in Southeast Asia will surely remember the Patek Philippe Watch Art Grand Exhibition held in Singapore at Marina Bay Sands in 2019. Showcasing 467 timepieces, it was the fifth, and then-largest, grand exhibition organised by the iconic Genevan watchmaking company—after editions in Dubai (2012), Munich (2013), London (2015) and New York (2017)—and the first held in Asia.

After the success of the Singapore exhibition, which was visited by almost 70,000 people over the course of 16 days, Patek Philippe decided that the next one would be in Tokyo in 2021—after the Munich exhibition, it had become tradition to organise a grand exhibition every two years. But, of course, the world stopped turning in 2020 and the showcase was postponed.

Two years after it was originally scheduled—and four since the Singapore event—the Patek Philippe Watch Art Grand Exhibition finally arrived in Tokyo on June 10 this year. The opening date was auspiciously chosen: in Japan, the 10th of June is celebrated as Time Day, or Toki no Kinenbi, which marks the anniversary of time.

According to Japanese historians, in the year 671 AD, emperor Tenchi Tenno ordered the building of a large stone water clock, which was unveiled on June 10 as the first clock ever used in Japan. The anniversary of this event started to be recognised in 1920, when the Tokyo Astronomical Observatory, along with a branch of the Ministry of Education, wanted the Japanese people to respect the importance of time and to, as it was put back then, “save time and improve and streamline life in the same way as Europe and America”. Given that the Japanese are arguably the world’s most punctual people, it is fair to say that they have long surpassed their American and European counterparts in respecting time.