Luxury
Flowers in the Eyes of Time
Artist Takashi Murakami sees the value in creating a watch brand all his own.
Takashi Murakami has spent decades proving that a smile can be serious business. The Japanese artist coined the term Superflat, which describes both the flattened, graphic tradition of Japanese art as well as the consumer-saturated culture of the postwar era. Murakami has built a career on refusing to separate the gallery from the worlds of merchandise, fashion and animation. His grinning flowers became a global signature. In the early 2000s, at Marc Jacobs's invitation, he reworked Louis Vuitton's monogram, and today the business of making and selling his images runs through Kaikai Kiki, the company he founded, which also manages younger artists.
Beneath the cheer, there are skulls. They appear in his work from the early 2000s onward and carry the oldest warning in art being that time is short. Critics and auction houses have linked his return to the motif to the disasters that struck Japan in 2011. Joy and mortality sit side by side in his imagery, so it is hardly a surprise that he has now turned to the object we use to count the hours.
Why artists and watches belong together
A watch is one of the few things we own that must do a job and make an artistic or creative statement. It has to keep time faithfully, and also has to be beautiful in a space smaller than a matchbox. Structural elements entailing a dial that works like a tiny canvas, a case that works like a pocket sculpture, and a mechanism most owners will never see but are pleased to know is there. Art sits at the other end of the same spectrum as expressive first. Though the best of it has always served a purpose too, whether to remember, to warn or to console. Put an artist and a watchmaker in a room and they are working on the same problem, namely how much personality can a useful object hold?
A history of borrowed names
Brands have been asking artists that question for a long time. In the mid-1980s, Swatch began its Art Special editions with a watch by the French artist Kiki Picasso, turning an affordable plastic watch into a miniature gallery wall. The luxury houses took the idea upmarket, and Murakami has been part of that story for years. Hublot launched the first of its Murakami watches in January 2021, the Classic Fusion Takashi Murakami All Black, and followed that December with the Sapphire Rainbow in a limited edition of 100. In 2023 came the MP-15, a far more ambitious collaboration built around a central tourbillon, first shown as a one-off for the Only Watch charity auction and later released in limited form.
Others have followed the same path. Audemars Piguet's Royal Oak Concept Tourbillon "Companion," made with the artist KAWS and unveiled in November 2024, is a 43 mm titanium watch limited to 250 pieces and priced at roughly $242,000 at today's rates. Two months ago, Hublot added a Jeff Koons edition, the Classic Fusion Balloon Dog, in three colorways of 200 pieces each, at around $25,000.
The arrangement in each case is much the same. The artist brings imagery and a point of view. The brand brings the movement, the case, the workshop, the distribution and its own name. The artist's signature may be on the watch, but it is still the brand's watch.
When Art Met the Wristwatch
The collaborator becomes the owner
Time Objects changes that arrangement. This month Murakami unveiled Takashi Murakami Time Objects, a watch brand that carries his own name, with the Skull Flowers collection as its debut. After years of lending his flowers to Swiss houses, he is no longer a guest on someone else's product line. The brand is his, and so is the argument its first watch makes.
What changes when the name on the brand is the artist's? Authorship becomes whole. In a collaboration, an artist can decorate a case or reimagine a dial, but the underlying architecture belongs to the brand. Here the form of the object, the way it shows the time, the finish and the edition sizes all flow from a single point of view. Coverage of the launch reports that Murakami's team explored more than 600 skull shapes before settling on the final one. The time display, usually the one thing a watch cannot compromise on, has been moved off the face onto a cylinder set into its side, near six o'clock, leaving the front of the watch to the skull and flowers. The motif does not stop at the surface. Murakami's flower reappears on the tourbillon's cage, while skulls and flowers are engraved in a repeating motif across the barrel bridge, details few owners will see unless they flip the watch over.
There is an art-world logic to all of this. Sculptors rarely cast their own bronzes. They conceive the work and hire the finest foundry to realize it. Murakami has long worked through a studio structure rather than by his own hand alone, and a watch brand extends the same model where the vision belongs to the artist, and the engineering belongs to a specialist. The movement, Caliber KM 7012 TM, was developed exclusively for the watch by Marco Tedeschi, the watchmaker who founded Kross Studio.
Ownership removes a cushion. A collaboration borrows the credibility of a century-old watch house. An artist-owned brand has to earn that credibility watch by watch, in a field where collectors scrutinize movements as closely as they judge art.
On the wrist
The watch itself is a skull in Grade 5 titanium, measuring 44 mm in diameter and standing 18.4 mm high, a substantial presence on any wrist. The two entry references, Black Rainbow and All Black, wear a microblasted black DLC coating, a matte skin that lets the flowers do the talking. Three gem-set Full Pavé versions follow, in diamonds, black diamonds and rainbow-colored stones, each set with 744 stones (about 9.3 carats on the diamond versions).
The eyes are the kinetic heart of the piece. Each flower rotates on ball bearings, driven simply by the motion of the wearer's wrist, the one place where the watch moves purely for the pleasure.
Telling the time takes a moment's adjustment. The hours snap forward once every sixty minutes while the minutes creep along on a disc. The hours run on a 24-hour scale where morning and afternoon are never confused. There is no crown to spoil the skull's outline. The watch is wound with a ring built into the case back, and a small pusher on the left flank unlocks time setting, which is then done with that same ring.
Turn the watch over and a flying tourbillon shows through the sapphire back. The movement is hand-wound and made of 409 components and 81 jewels, with a power reserve of 125 hours, just over five days. It beats at 21,600 vibrations per hour, or three hertz, which is slower than the 28,800 common in many modern watches. That is no flaw. A slower beat conserves energy, which both a five-day reserve and a tourbillon cage depend on. Beat rate alone says little about accuracy, which comes from design and regulation. Nothing about this watch suggests it is meant to compete as a precision instrument. It is meant to be looked at. The crystal is sapphire, water resistance is 30 meters, and the strap is rubber with a titanium folding clasp.
The Black Rainbow and All Black are each priced at about $103,000, and limited to 12 pieces each. The gem-set versions run from roughly $169,000 for the Rainbow to $172,000 for the Black Diamonds and $179,000 for the Diamonds. Edition sizes for those three have not been disclosed. No release date or retailer has been announced, and the launch materials point interested buyers to the Kaikai Kiki website.
A very old warning
Skull watches have a long pedigree. In Reformation-era Europe, watchmakers in places such as Blois and Geneva made them as reminders of mortality, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art holds a Genevan example dated to around 1650. Murakami's skull belongs to that tradition and extends it, setting living flowers in the sockets where a memento mori once held only absence.
The message has not changed. Time is passing, and every hour counts. What has changed is who is delivering it. After years of lending his flowers to other houses, Murakami now puts his own name behind the object, and invites Time Objects to be valued as a watch brand in its own right.
The message has not changed. Time is passing, and every hour counts.