Making time for his craft

"Craftsmanship is becoming outdated these days," he adds. "The watch manufacturing industry is becoming increasingly dominated by cutting-edge precision machines that can produce high-quality watches with high levels of consistency."

Today, Guo is among a growing group of independent Chinese horologists who have been capturing the attention of watch enthusiasts around the world. Following the debut of his clock and a flying tourbillon pocket watch at the 2017 Baselworld, Guo showed off his handmade wristwatch "The Goddess Chang'e Flying to the Moon" at the 2018 edition of the fair. At this year's event, he presented a new wristwatch called "Blooming" which features an image of flames and 500 diamonds on the dial. The watch was sold for nearly $30,000.

However, even that was just a drop in the bucket compared to the customized wristwatch he once crafted for a collector in the Middle East that cost several million yuan.

Guo's passion for watchmaking first started as a fascination with how the various components within the sewing machines that his repairman father worked on interacted with one another. As a child, his reward for completing his homework was getting to learn about how these machines functioned. The birth of his love for watches, he recalls, was in 1998, when he found himself a part-time job at a local vintage clock and watch store in Melbourne, Australia, where he was pursuing a business diploma.

"I was simply intrigued by all the antique clocks as I opened and cleaned their cases. I thought it was amazing that the parts of these clocks, which were made 300 years ago, sparkled like they were brand new," he says. "I felt like I had opened a box of treasures."