Guo Ming

Guo Ming is an independent watchmaker and one of the most remarkable figures in the emergence of Chinese independent horology — a one-man atelier in Shanghai producing an extremely small number of timepieces per year, each deeply rooted in Chinese cultural and mythological tradition and executed to a standard that earned him membership in the AHCI. He was born in Zhangjiagang, Jiangsu Province, on China's eastern coast, and grew up with a father who repaired sewing machines for a living — an early and formative exposure to micromechanics and the satisfaction of understanding how intricate mechanical objects work. In the 1990s his family moved to Shanghai, and in the late 1990s Guo Ming went abroad to study. During his spare time abroad he found a part-time job in a local antique clock and watch shop, and that encounter changed the direction of his life. He was captivated by the beauty and complexity of vintage mechanical timepieces — their ability to encode centuries of accumulated human knowledge into objects small enough to wear on the wrist — and began to study watchmaking seriously, learning from watch teachers and deepening his knowledge of watch repair, theory, and the history of the craft.

The pivotal relationship of his watchmaking career came through a chance encounter with Frank Jutzi, the Swiss independent watchmaker and AHCI member based in Wichtrach in the canton of Bern, near Switzerland's capital. Jutzi, a respected independent maker known within the AHCI community, examined Guo Ming and accepted him — becoming his first ever Chinese student. In 2013 Guo Ming travelled to Wichtrach and worked directly in Jutzi's workshop, a traditional Swiss small-scale atelier, absorbing the finishing standards, movement construction discipline, and philosophical approach to independent watchmaking that Jutzi embodied. This experience in Switzerland anchored Guo Ming's technical formation in the European independent tradition while his creative sensibility remained wholly rooted in Chinese culture, history, and legend. By 2012 he had already established his own studio in Shanghai — a workshop that serves simultaneously as his creative atelier, as a training base for watchmaking students in partnership with ICL (Geneva's Institut de Cooperatives à Lausanne) as part of that organisation's educational programme in China, and as a repair and restoration practice for vintage clocks and watches of all kinds, for which Guo Ming has developed considerable expertise. He teaches as a watchmaking professor at Shanghai Industrial Technical School, and collaborates with the Shanghai Clock & Watch Science Museum — making him both a practitioner and a steward of Chinese horological culture at every level.

Guo Ming's debut at the international stage came at Baselworld 2017, where he presented a mechanical clock and a flying tourbillon pocket watch that first brought him to the attention of the AHCI jury and the broader independent watchmaking community. The AHCI accepted him as a candidate — making him, at the time, the youngest Chinese independent watchmaker ever admitted to the organisation.

The watch that made his name internationally was unveiled at Baselworld 2018: 'The Goddess Chang'e Flying to the Moon' (嫦娥奔月) — a 43mm wristwatch powered by a hand-wound movement with 21 jewels, housing a tourbillon, moon phase, and a retrograde seconds display whose hand is shaped to resemble a rabbit. The mythological resonance of each element is precise: in Chinese legend, Chang'e is the goddess of the Moon, who ascended to the celestial sphere after drinking the elixir of immortality that her husband Houyi had received as a reward for shooting down nine of the ten suns that were scorching the earth. Her companion on the moon is the Jade Rabbit — the Yutu — who can be seen in the moon's surface by those who know how to look. The retrograde rabbit seconds hand is therefore not a decorative whim but a mythologically specific reference, the Jade Rabbit marking the passage of seconds across the lower portion of the enamel dial whose scene depicts the goddess herself in flight. The enamel dial is a hand-painted rendition of the mythological scene, a technically demanding process that requires multiple firings of vitreous enamel and extreme stability of hand to apply successfully. The watch was met with immediate acclaim from specialists and collectors, featured in Robb Report and numerous specialist publications, and confirmed Guo Ming's standing as an artist-watchmaker of genuine distinction.

At Baselworld 2019 Guo Ming presented 'Blooming' — a new wristwatch featuring an image of flames across the dial set with 500 diamonds, which sold for close to USD 30,000. Each Guo Ming piece is a unique commission driven by a specific concept, cultural reference, or narrative, and produced in an extremely small number — typically one or a handful — through the entirely manual process of a one-man workshop. His philosophy, stated on his website, frames mechanical watchmaking as the world simulated by mechanics: a synthesis of the changed and the unchanged, the quiet and the bustling, full of magic and requiring connoisseurs to understand and appreciate. He cites Vincent Calabrese, Svend Andersen, George Daniels, and Philippe Dufour as the masters whose footsteps he hopes to follow. Guo Ming attained full AHCI membership in 2025, completing the journey from candidate — the youngest Chinese candidate in the organisation's history — to member.