Swatch Art Peace Hotel: Shanghai on Your Wrist
Alec
Six Chinese artists turn flowers, graffiti and Shanghai architecture into watches for the Swatch Art Peace Hotel’s 15th anniversary. The strongest detail? A whole waterfront squeezed onto a wrist.
More than 20 buildings appear on BUND-ASTIC, Feng Bin’s contribution to the Swatch Art Peace Hotel collection. The residence’s roof takes centre stage on the dial, surrounded by the architecture of Shanghai’s Bund. It is a small canvas for a substantial cityscape, and a good introduction to a collection that gives six artists the same brief with very different results.
Opened on 1 November 2011, the Swatch Art Peace Hotel is an artists’ residence in Shanghai. Over its first 15 years, it has hosted more than 650 artists from 61 countries, offering space to live, work and exchange ideas. For this anniversary, Swatch has brought together six Chinese artists who have stayed there, translating an original work by each into a watch.
Feng Bin’s architectural approach draws on a practice rooted in ceramic painting and contemporary Chinese culture. His watch makes the connection to the residence explicit: the building that hosted the artist becomes part of the artwork. Among the six designs, it offers the most direct souvenir of the place itself.
Elsewhere, the city gives way to flowers, though there is little agreement on what a flower should look like. Luo Bi, whose practice involves virtual ecosystems and 3D design, imagines blooms beyond the human world in DIGI-BLOSSOMING. Han Feng takes another route with FLOWERING PLUM, bringing an interest in plum blossoms to a visual language shaped by Chinese ink aesthetics, painting and collage. The shared subject makes their different approaches particularly clear.
The sharpest change of register comes with CURVILINEAR. Shanghai artist Wang Shuai translates Thirty Thousand Lines, a work conceived during her residency, into intricate black and white drawing. Its winding lines symbolise life’s course. Alongside the collection’s floral imagery and urban references, this monochrome design makes complexity a matter of line rather than colour.
Green Lava and Yu Yang (YY) bring backgrounds in graffiti and street art. STREET EYE draws on Green Lava’s vocabulary of plants, animals, human figures and urban symbols, balancing order with visual commotion. YY’s BLOW AWAY puts his character Guan Xiao Ye against a bright yellow background, combining Chinese good wishes with references to tradition and pop culture.
What holds these watches together is a shared address rather than a shared aesthetic. Each artist has lived and worked at the residence, but the resulting designs preserve distinct interests and techniques. Architecture remains architecture; a line drawing does not have to become a street art graphic to belong in the same collection.
That gives the anniversary a tangible subject beyond the date. Six watches show what passed through one Shanghai residence, from virtual flowers to ceramic painting and graffiti. On BUND-ASTIC, the connection is compressed into the roof on the dial: a small reminder of where the exchange began.
