Swatch Projects
Swatch Art Peace Hotel Residency
From December 2020 to April 2021, Kalman Pool was selected as an artist-in-residence at the prestigious Swatch Art Peace Hotel in Shanghai. During his four-month residency, Kalman developed a body of work exploring myth, memory, and spectral presences in architectural space. His project, Phantom of the Palace Hotel, was an emotional response to the hotel’s layered colonial history and the spirits it seemed to carry.
“Numerous nights wandering around the empty hallway, a sense of sympathy and empathy had arisen, as if I was talking to the invisible.”
— Kalman Pool
The residency laid the groundwork for Kalman’s subsequent collaboration with Swatch, establishing a dialogue between physical painting, symbolic forms, and contemporary design.
Swatch X You – Artist Watch Series
In May 2021, Kalman Pool was invited by the Swiss National Pavilion at the inaugural China International Consumer Products Expo (Hainan Expo) to participate in the Swatch X You artist collaboration program. His limited-edition watch design draws upon his long-standing Luminous Opera series—a fictional language system composed of fluorescent hieroglyphs.
Kalman's design wraps the Swatch band in glowing symbols—transmissions from an imagined universe where meaning is intuitive, hybrid, and vibrantly alive. Visitors to the pavilion could customize their watch by adjusting the visible section of Kalman's original artwork, turning each timepiece into a unique wearable message.
The project was officially launched during the Expo and endorsed by the Swiss Ambassador to China. It reflects Kalman’s ongoing interest in merging speculative language, digital aesthetics, and consumer culture into new forms of artistic intervention.