This $200 Watch Is Actually a Conceptual Art Piece
This is an edition of the newsletter Box + Papers, Cam Wolf’s weekly deep dive into the world of watches. It’s currently being manned by Jeremy Freed, watch writer extraordinaire, while Cam is on parental leave. Sign up here.
When we talk about watchmaking craft, we’re usually talking about the white-coated specialists who toil away assembling movements and engraving guilloché dials in Swiss alpine ateliers. Their miraculous creations are both timekeeping devices and works of art, but—as every aspiring collector knows—they don’t come cheap. Che-Wei Wang and Taylor Levy don’t produce skeletonized perpetual calendars or minute-repeaters adorned with grand feu enamel, but, at $199, their Solid State Watch offers its own kind of handmade appeal, along with a healthy dollop of artistic gravitas, at a far more accessible price than those Swiss grails. It might also keep better time.
The CW&T Solid State Watch is as diabolically simple as it is aesthetically pleasing. Created by Levy and Wang, a pair of Brooklyn-based artists who specialize in whimsical DIY industrial design, it consists of a Casio F-91W module cast in resin and attached to a simple white textile strap. Each Solid State Watch is made to order in CW&T’s Bed-Stuy studio, and set to the wearer’s desired timezone before being forever entombed in its transparent resin case.
The result looks like what might happen if Jony Ive designed a Casio digital watch for NASA circa 1997, all gentle curves and precisely arranged technical guts. It displays the hours, minutes, seconds, and the day of the week, but because of its sealed resin case, it can never be adjusted, and its battery can never be replaced. Wang and Levy estimate that a Solid State Watch should run for well over a decade before its battery gives out, at which point—like a vintage mechanical watch with a shot movement—its main function will be strictly decorative.
All of which makes the Solid State Watch the polar opposite of a handmade mechanical timepiece in one sense, and surprisingly similar in another. Instead of being painstakingly crafted by a team of grave-faced artisans in La Chaux-de-Fonds, each Solid State watch is made by CW&T’s intrepid studio assistant, Colin. And while its simple digital module is accurate to ±1 second per day—significantly better than most mechanical watches—it’s probably not the kind of thing you’ll be bequeathing to anyone in your will.
That said, aside from its value as an asset, the real function of a watch in 2026 isn’t timekeeping. Instead, whether it’s a six-figure minute-repeater or a $20 Casio, a watch is as much about providing a tangible connection to the ceaseless march of time as displaying the hours and minutes. In that sense, the Solid State Watch offers a commentary on the nature of time, technology, and human endeavor that’s as resonant as anything those Swiss wizards can create. I called Wang and Levy to ask them about art, timekeeping, and the beauty of ’80s digital watches.
Box + Papers: Do you think of yourselves as watch designers?
Che-Wei Wang: Definitely not watch designers. It’s a mix between industrial design and art. We really enjoy making art, so we make products that we think are one-offs and that nobody is going to want, and then we end up making enough of them that it kind of feels like an industrial design product. But we’re not trying to sell something; we’re just trying to make things that we want.
Did you anticipate the Solid State Watch would be such a success?
Che-Wei Wang: We never had an expectation that it would sell so well. We put it out as a Kickstarter, and we thought that’ll be it. It took a while.
