One of Van Cleef & Arpels’ most uncompromising examples of that philosophy could well be the Planétarium Automaton. At half a metre wide, it’s unapologetically excessive, defiantly analogue and positioned to challenge what an “extraordinary object” can be in the age of digital minimalism. But to understand why this piece matters, you first have to consider the unique ecosystem Van Cleef & Arpels has built around mechanical emotion.

The maison is often described as a jeweller who makes watches and seems happy to wear the label. It doesn’t court watch forums or chase movement specs in quite the way other watch brands do. And yes, I’ve had the pleasure — or displeasure — of poring through said incredibly lengthy, jargon-infused technical pages. Since unveiling the Poetic Complications collection in 2006, Van Cleef & Arpels has resisted this temptation and made the narrative the starting point, leaving the obsessively passionate team led by its head of R&D for watchmaking, Rainer Bernard, to figure out the mechanics.

Collectors and horological journalists often point out that the brand’s technical investments funnel almost exclusively into mechanical poetry: Narrative automata, on-demand animations and complications designed to express emotion rather than precision. And among independent watchmakers, there’s a level of respect — though often unspoken — for this refusal to participate in the traditional engineering arms race.

Case in point, Van Cleef & Arpels’ Pont des Amoureux watches, introduced in 2010. Yes, the lovers on the dial move via a double retrograde display, meeting twice daily. But the real innovation isn’t the mechanism but the decision to make a watch about hesitation – those three minutes when the figures pause, disrupt the normal flow of time and force you to confront it differently. Intimacy rendered mechanically, as Bernard so poetically told me at this year’s Watches & Wonders.

The maison’s more recent evolution of this theme, the Lady Arpels Bal des Amoureux Automate, steps into territory most brands avoid because of its sheer complexity: realistic movement at a miniature scale. The lovers no longer slide mechanically toward each other but instead articulate.

Arms bend, bodies tilt, shoulders shift: a level of expression and intricacy that required four years of engineering to hide an automaton under a dial without adding bulk. But Bernard is quick to explain they “weren’t chasing complexity for its own sake. We were chasing gestures. Getting a shoulder to drop by half a millimetre without derailing the mechanism is harder than adding a grand complication.”

Grisaille enamel, a technique traditionally reserved for museum restoration and mid-16th-century devotional art, pushes the Bal des Amoureux further away from modern watch norms. It’s slow, costly and unforgiving. There’s no way to predict how the enamel layers will behave in the kiln. In other words, it satisfies none of the requirements of scalable luxury manufacturing. But it’s an ancient technique that Van Cleef & Arpels keeps using.

At 50 cm tall and 66.5 cm wide, Van Cleef & Arpels’ Planétarium makes quite the entrance. It orbits the planets at their actual astronomical periods, Jupiter in 11.86 years and Saturn in 29.5, and expects its owner to live long enough — or is, at least, patient enough — to witness the slow choreography. A direct rebuke to the instant gratification culture.

A Sainte-Croix specialist who works on automata for several maisons, describes it thus: “The most technically unnecessary but philosophically meaningful thing I’ve seen a brand attempt in years.” Inside, a shooting star carved in rose gold and Mystery Set rubies triggers an on-demand animation that sets the entire mechanical solar system in motion — some planets rising, others reversing orbit, accompanied by a crystalline chime from a 15-bell carillon. Beneath the custom-blown glass dome, lapis discs — 15 of them — are inlaid with gold constellations, forcing the viewer to engage with depth, not flatness.

The maison’s decision to bring this automaton to Hong Kong makes perfect sense. A ground for ultra-high-end mechanical art, it’s a city where collectors have grown more informed, more experimental and less tolerant of brand platitudes.

Not competing on the grounds of precision or innovation, Van Cleef occupies a strange but compelling position in today’s watch industry. It’s doubling down on something rarer: emotion built from engineering and not, or at least to a lesser degree, marketing.

The Planétarium automaton is the clearest statement yet of this philosophy. It’s a machine that asks something far more demanding of its owner: patience, curiosity and the willingness to slow down enough to notice a universe moving at the speed it was always meant to. Discover the magic, enchantment and, of course, technical mastery of Van Cleef & Arpels’ horological masterpieces at an exhibition that’s open to the public from January 24 to February 8 next year.