The Patek Philippe Watch Art Grand Exhibition is like a travelling road show that takes place every two years. In previous years it has visited Dubai, Munich, London, New York City and Singapore, and, following a one-year delay caused by the world stopping in 2020, this year saw its return with an amazing instalment in Tokyo. The show ran from the 10th of June, which in Japan is known as Time Day, or Toki no Kinenbi and ended yesterday, on June 25th.

ABOVE: Patek Philippe created a free-for-all show of more than 2,500 square metres in Tokyo this time around – the largest ever conceived for one of its Grand Exhibitions.

In short, the exhibition offered a unique journey into watchmaking with ten themed areas encompassing 500 timepieces and objects including the entire current collection and 50 unique pieces inspired by Japanese culture, as well as six new releases to celebrate the occasion. (Sadly though, these new watches are all very limited in supply and available exclusively to residents of Japan, so if you really want one then you’ll have to wait a few years before they pop up on the secondary market at, you’d assume, much higher prices.)

Interestingly, it seems Patek has been having some fun with colours. Of the six watches, there’s a salmon dial quadruple complication (above), a royal purple-hued world timer (below left), an interesting pearly grey sunburst dial reference (below centre) and two pastel-coloured Calatravas (below right).

Our favourite of the bunch is the Quadruple Complication 5308P, which is a platinum split-seconds chronograph sporting both a minute repeater and an instantaneous perpetual calendar. It’s quite a large watch, at 42mm in diameter and 17mm in thickness but that’s because it must allow for some serious watchmaking. It takes the Ref. 5208 as its base, which when it debuted in 2011, was the first Patek to contain an aperture-based perpetual calendar, chronograph, and minute repeater and adds a split-seconds function to the watch, hence the “quadruple” in the name. It also introduces a gorgeous salmon dial that we really want to see used elsewhere, as only 15 examples of this watch will be made.

Patek Philippe Ref. 5330G-010 (left) is a world timer that offers something never seen before: a date indication that synchronizes with the local time (which appears at 12 o’clock with the time indicated by the central white-gold hands). The Ref. 7121-200G (centre) offers ladies a moon phase that’s so accurate, it only deviates from the true lunar cycle by one day in 122 years. And the Patek Philippe Ref. 7127G (right) is one of two pastel coloured Calatravas.