After last year's partnership with streetwear label Fxxking Rabbits (#FR2), Franck Muller revisits Japan to find another collaborator for its Lunar New Year timepiece.
As a result, Tokyo-based artist Ryoko Kaneta and the Swiss watchmaker have given the mythical dragon a quirky guise.
The fifth Chinese zodiac animal has been anthropomorphised as Kaneta's signature doll-like girls on the Cintrée Curvex Ryoko Kaneta Dragon Limited Edition.
Kaneta was born in 1991 -- the same year that Franck Muller met Vartan Sirmakes, who encouraged him to launch his eponymous brand.
In 1992, they co-founded the independent company whose contemporary take on haute horlogerie creates exclusive timepieces characterised by original designs and complicated movements.
Thanks to its perfectly curved case and unique contours, the Cintrée Curvex is Franck Muller's most distinctive model produced at Watchland in Genthod, Geneva.
According to Kaneta, its most striking feature is the curvilinear elements, which extend in all three dimensions. This inspired the different interactions of her playful dragon girls with the Arabic numerals on the dial of the Cintrée Curvex Ryoko Kaneta Dragon Limited Edition.
The millennial painter normally draws inspiration from ancient Japanese philosophy, and her artworks often express the existence of gods and natural phenomena.
Cintrée Curvex Ryoko Kaneta Dragon Limited Edition.
Her dreamy large-scale paintings celebrate nature's ephemerality as they emphasise the frailty of time, the phenomenon of weather and all the accompanying dramatic seasonal transformations.
Various aspects of nature are presented via anthropomorphic beings rendered in a chibi style that echoes Japanese pop culture's obsession with anything kawaii.
For her collaboration with Franck Muller, Kaneta drew on East Asian beliefs that revere the dragon as a divine figure blessing the Earth with rain for a bountiful harvest.
Hints of aqua blue on the cute dragon girls provide a visual link to their role as rainbringers. The blue numerals and turquoise dial further express the dragon's ties to the element of water.
In addition, the lacquered dial plays with light via its textured guilloché pattern.
Equipped with a self-winding movement offering a power reserve of 42 hours, the Cintrée Curvex Ryoko Kaneta Dragon Limited Edition is available in 500 pieces, exclusive to Asia Pacific.
