In this collector’s feature, Reuben shares his watch collecting experience from a quartz TAG Heuer Aquaracer to Rolex, Citizen and Trilobe, and how his collection has become less about chasing a grail and instead working out what is considered a good watch.
The Collector’s View: Reuben Leong’s story as a collector
My first serious Swiss watch arrived before I really knew what a serious Swiss watch was. At 21, my parents gifted me a blue TAG Heuer Aquaracer WAF1113.BA0801 in quartz (gasp). It would not be considered particularly horologically sophisticated, yet with the benefit of hindsight, it probably established more of my collecting instincts than I realised. An interesting observation – many Singaporeans’ coming-of-age watches seem to be a TAG Heuer Aquaracer, Formula 1 or Link, and I count myself blessed enough to be amongst them.
I was immediately drawn to the striking blue dial and its small but effective plots of lume. Both worked in tandem for the visual spectacle and distinct pleasure of a watch changing character from navy to electric blue in different lighting conditions. More importantly, I was not yet deep enough in the proverbial rabbit hole to discuss movement architecture or finishing, but my foot was definitely caught. Without consciously realising it, I wanted a watch to be visually interesting and comfortably wearable. More tenets would soon stack upon these foundational preferences.
Starting a Watch Collection: Everyone’s Got to Start Somewhere… and Get It Wrong
Fast forward to my first bonus after starting work and the inevitable ‘dive off the deep end’. I rewarded myself with what I then considered my first serious Swiss watch: a Rolex Submariner Date Ref. 16610LV Mk III. I even flew to Germany for it, which at the time felt like a perfectly reasonable thing to do for a green-bezel Submariner and, in retrospect, was probably the first sign that this hobby was going to become more involved than intended.
The ownership did not last. Comments and pressures from people around me at my workplace made me increasingly conscious of what the watch represented to others, and I eventually sold it. The discomfort afterwards surprised me. I was less upset about losing the Rolex itself than about allowing external perception to influence something that had begun as a very personal interest. A watch bought to mark my own achievement had somehow become subject to everybody else’s interpretation of it.
“But Did You Die?” – Mr Chow from the Hangover
That experience became a useful reset. If I was going to continue collecting, I wanted to understand watches better and, perhaps more importantly, understand what I actually liked about them. I realised that watch collecting, much like my approach to most endeavours, was less of a destination defined by acquiring a particular reference, and more of a journey through ideas, manufactures and different expressions of watchmaking.
I started by turning the experience back towards where it began and purchased my mother a coral-red Rolex Oyster Perpetual 36 Ref. 126000 – a small attempt to return the gesture my parents had made when they bought me the Aquaracer. There was something satisfying about watches becoming personal again. The significance of the piece had little to do with complication count or movement finishing; it came from who it was for and why it was bought. This particular piece stood out amongst the stable of stainless steel mid-sized watches when it was released alongside four other bright, solid-coloured lacquer-dial Oyster Perpetuals, and I knew that it was the perfect item to capture my mother’s indefatigable approach to life.
As I explored further, a few themes began to repeat themselves. Visual interest remained important, but it was now joined by horological depth, movement architecture and the extent to which a maison participated in watchmaking beyond simply producing an attractive object. I became increasingly interested in manufactures that contributed through movement development, technical research, specialist crafts or a broader role within the industry. For the watches themselves, the kid in me still gets overly excited by exceptional lume. Some preferences, apparently, are too deeply embedded to be educated out of you.
Somewhere along the way I coined a personal maxim: ‘A well-made watch remains just that, regardless of price.’ I would like to claim this was the product of a carefully considered philosophy about democratising good watchmaking. In practice, it also gave me excellent intellectual cover for buying the Citizen Zenshin 60 Mechanical Ref. NK5020-58L, almost immediately after handling it in the metal and reading the spec sheet. Super Titanium and a 60-hour power reserve from the automatic Calibre 8322 make for an annoyingly persuasive proposition; then Citizen added properly lumed hands and indices, and an ice-blue fumé dial whose striated texture occasionally resembles an eagle’s eye (yes, I am aware of what comparison I am inviting). The dial shifts from an almost icy blue at its centre to deeper tones around the edges, while the asymmetric seconds display gives what could easily have been another integrated-bracelet sports watch just enough visual oddity to keep me staring at it. Apparently, my carefully developed collecting ethos can occasionally be reduced to ‘interesting dial, small seconds and lots of lume’ – but at least the supporting specifications are respectable.
What Makes a Good Watch and a Moving Definition of ‘Good’
The watches that stayed – or arrived later – began to make more sense when viewed through that developing ethos. They do not form an especially tidy collection by conventional standards, but each scratches a different part of the same itch. I decided to put this understanding to the test head-on; by engaging with the manufacture that has arguably the largest brand cache of the modern age.
Cue, the Rolex GMT-Master II ‘Pepsi’ Ref. 126710BLRO in the collection as a good example. At its centre is what I would consider a fairly restrained, perhaps even boring, Rolex professional dial, executed to faultless levels of utility. Yet, when framed within the red-and-blue Cerachrom bezel insert and placed beneath a sapphire crystal with anti-reflective coating, the entire watch sings. The face pops with clarity against the colour surrounding it, turning a familiar Rolex format into something far more visually animated – an uncomplicated, highly legible foundation made into visual theatre.
The Land-Dweller 36 Ref. 127234 appears in the collection for the same reasons, albeit expressed differently. Most acquaintances handling the watch in person wholeheartedly agree; online pictures do not do justice to how arresting the dial texture is in the metal. Attention is soon drawn to the flat-jubilee bracelet, executed to high tolerances with mixed textures of brushed and polished bevels. Finally, the eyes trace its silhouette to the rear, featuring a transparent sapphire caseback from which the Calibre 7135 can be admired. The high-beat movement gives the watch technical substance that can be appreciated beyond a specification sheet. For all that engineering, however, my affection for it is considerably less cerebral: it is simply a fantastic daily beater. The 36 mm proportions make it easy to wear, the dial gives me something to look at, and there is enough going on mechanically to keep the enthusiast in me satisfied when I inevitably turn the watch over. Frame that all in an outline reminiscent of the Rolex Oysterquartz Datejust Ref. 17013, and it’s found permanent residency in my heart… until a two-toned yellow gold or full yellow gold version is released, that is.
Then there’s the Nuit Fantastique Ref. NF05BG in the collection, pushing the boundaries of tenets I established earlier, and demonstrating ‘the dichotomy of man Pro Max’. Starting with my definition of legibility; don’t get me wrong, the Nuit Fantastique is visually clean and legible. But often, with a half-smile hanging on the person holding it, the next words are usually, “Exactly what am I supposed to be looking at, though?”. The abstract display forces time to be read differently, while the unconventional movement layout gives the watch a mechanical identity distinct from the usual arrangement of hands mounted on a central pinion. I tell myself that owning it is useful practice for learning to read the time with no hands – or at least fewer of them (a not-so-subtle teaser for another piece joining the collection soon). More seriously, it represents something I increasingly value in collecting: a watchmaker being willing to reconsider established norms, such as how time should be displayed, rather than merely finding another way to decorate the same architecture.
Extracting logos from ethos within a watch collection
I have come to realise that I am very much a journey-not-destination kind of person, and watch collecting has followed much the same pattern. This is also why I have never subscribed particularly strongly to the idea of a grail watch. A grail assumes a relatively fixed destination, which is difficult to reconcile when the person pursuing it is rarely fixed at all. Viewed from the outside, this approach can look unfocused. Pieces move into and out of the collection (and sometimes return), the idea of ‘what good looks like’ shifts, and I am increasingly comfortable with that. The coherence is not necessarily found in the watches themselves, but why they were present in the collection at all; and every so often, good fortune has a funny way of returning an old chapter to the story. The wearer may have become a rather different person by then, but would not have arrived there without the experiences that came before.
Perhaps that is what I now want from my horological journey: an incremental process of self-expression and understanding. Not a perfectly curated taxonomy of references, nor a steady march towards a single ultimate purchase, but a record of memories and experiences captured within mechanical (and occasionally battery-powered) objects, polished to a visually pleasing sheen. As long as each piece has given me some of that, the journey is still doing what it should.
Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.
