Edison Chen — watch collection

About Edison Chen’s watch collection

Edison Chen is a Hong Kong-Canadian actor, rapper, entrepreneur, and streetwear figure who built one of the more culturally influential careers to come out of Hong Kong cinema in the 2000s. He broke through with roles in films such as Infernal Affairs and its sequels, working alongside Tony Leung and Andy Lau before the franchise was adapted by Martin Scorsese into The Departed. Beyond acting, Chen founded the streetwear label CLOT in 2003 alongside Kevin Poon, which has since collaborated with Nike, Levi's, and Coca-Cola and helped position him as a serious player in the global fashion and creative industry. He has maintained a foothold in both entertainment and brand culture across Hong Kong, mainland China, and the United States.

The Edison Chen watch collection reflects the taste of someone who moves between professional sport, high fashion, and collector culture without much separation between them. The clearest evidence of that came courtside at a basketball game, where Chen surfaced wearing one of Audemars Piguet's more technically demanding pieces — the Royal Oak Perpetual Calendar reference 26579CB in all-white ceramic. The watch runs on AP's calibre 5134, a self-winding perpetual calendar movement operating at 19,800 vph with a 40-hour power reserve. It handles day, date, month, leap year, and moon phase autonomously, housed beneath a blue Grande Tapisserie dial with silver-toned subdials. Choosing a perpetual calendar in white ceramic rather than the more common steel or gold variants is a deliberate move — it is a harder material to produce and a less conventional choice within the Royal Oak line.

That single confirmed sighting tells a reasonable amount about where Chen's priorities sit. The Royal Oak Perpetual Calendar is not an entry point into Audemars Piguet — it sits toward the upper end of the Royal Oak catalogue in terms of both price and mechanical complexity. Wearing it in a casual, high-energy setting like a basketball game rather than reserving it for formal appearances suggests he treats serious watches as everyday objects, which is generally the mark of a collector who actually uses what he buys rather than one building for display.