Into The Void With The ‘Special Projects Cave’ MING 20.01 Series 3
The MING 20.01 Series 3 shows just how far lume can go.
MING has made a really enormous range of watches since the 17.01 launched back in 2017, but as that year fades in the rear view mirror, it’s also interesting to think about how much time has actually passed – 2017 was seven years ago, and the evolution of the brand’s technical and design language has been proceeding at a breakneck pace ever since. One common thread, however, in MING watches and a word you hear a lot in reviews, is “minimalist” which is a good first approximation – typically, and again, starting with the 17.01, MING watches have been characterized by a certain economy of means which both allows every design element to stand out, but which also requires every design element to be refined as much as possible since, so to speak, there’s nowhere to hide. I wouldn’t say that MING has embraced minimalism as it is strictly understood, per se – there is plenty of room for color and incident, and carefully deployed detail, in MING watches, especially in some of the complications – but at the same time, the watches usually give the impression of having had any unnecessary details removed in the interests of visual clarity.
The 20.01 Series 3 is not a maximalist watch – when I think of maximalism in watchmaking I think of watches like the Jacob & Co. Astronomia, which I hasten to add has its own distinct charms, if you’re open to them. But the 20.01 S3 in the level of detail it deploys, represents a richer range of detail than I think I’ve ever seen in a MING watch – and it presents some challenges in terms of evaluating it.
The 20.01 S3 follows the 20.01 S2 (one of which we looked at recently for A Watch A Week) which was a limited edition of 50 watches, delivered in 2022, and which had two particular standout features. The first was the use of the Agengraphe chronograph caliber, produced in a special variation for MING (hand-wound, rather than automatic, partly to keep the optical effects of the layered dial uncluttered and partly for the pure old-school pleasure of manually winding a watch).
The Agengraphe caliber, designed by Jean-Marc Wiederrecht, one of the world’s most respected complications specialists, uses a unique fricion-roller lateral clutch system, with an additional safety system to keep the transfer wheels from disengaging, and a snail-cam reset system intended to reduce the shock to the movement produced by traditional chronograph return to zero heart cams and hammers. It’s an extremely technically advanced and pretty aristocratic movement – bullhead configured, with the chronograph works located in a void in the center of the movement, and surrounded by the rest of the going train (a donut hole in a donut, so to speak).
The MING Mosaic Dial
The other standout feature was the Mosaic dial. The dial of the 20.01 S2 is a disk of optical grade synthetic sapphire, internally laser etched on three different levels, with 3,000 triangular elements. These are dazzling to look at on their own, but with the lights out, they also catch the light coming from the Super-LumiNova on the dial and underside of the crystal, and they glow like a fleet of UFOs caught in the moonlight.
The 20.01 S3 takes the use of Super-LumiNova – more specifically, Super-LumiNova X1 – to an entirely new level and among many other things the dial is a reminder of just how much room for creative interpretation there still exists to explore in the use of luminous material as a design element. The S3 dial is made of borosilicate glass – this is a type of glass notable for its toughness, and also for its low coefficient of thermal expansion; it’s used for laboratory glassware, among other things, and more prosaically, it can be found in your kitchen if you have any Pyrex glassware or cookware.
I don’t think I have ever heard of it being used in a watch dial before – now, glass, even borosilicate glass, might seem a wholly impractical material to use for watch dials, but remember, fired vitreous enamel is essentially glass and while I don’t thing we’re going to see it used for technical dive watches any time soon, the durability of enamel dials is a testimony to the material’s potential for longevity. Borosilicate glass was invented by the German glassmaker Otto Schott, in the late 19th century, and the company that bears his name – Schott AG – is still very much in business. One of their best known products, Zerodur, is a glass with an almost zero coefficient of thermal expansion; it’s used for optics in space telescopes and satellites and also as a bezel material by some watch brands.
First Light For The Mosaic Dial
What MING does with borosilicate glass, however, is something unprecedented. The underside of the dial has, etched into it by laser, 600 voids roughly in the shape of parallelograms. These are arranged in an expanding spiral with a size gradient – the largest voids are at the outside but they’re also the most widely spaced; the innermost voids are the smallest but very closely packed. The voids also vary in depth, producing a shallow amphitheater-like effect.
Now, this is not exactly what you would call an off-the-shelf component, and it’s not something that any conventional supplier of watch dials would be able to make, either. The technology is too difficult, for one thing; and for another a lot of dial makers nowadays are concentrating on legacy decorative arts like engraving, guilloché, horological gem setting, and marquetry. To produce the dial, MING had to go to a company which is a little off the beaten track of standard dial suppliers – the firm in question is Femtoprint SA, which is a Swiss company specializing in glass microfabrication for – well, I’ll let them tell you what for: ” … medical, biotech, optics, photonics, quantum, semiconductors, aerospace, AR & VR, energy, watchmaking, and more.” (The company has up until now been pretty low profile in the watch industry, although there’s a section of their website devoted to discussing their capabilities in glass dial and component fabrication for watches).
Creating the voids requires very exact control of the duration and power of the laser energy – “femto” refers to the femtosecond time scale (one quadrillionth of a second, during which time a beam of light travels about three microns). As with the preceding Mosaic dial, the laser etching process can produce significant transient internal stresses in the glass, so the etching process has to be carried out with great precision. Once the voids are formed, they are each filled, by hand, one by one, with a syringe, with a liquid form of Super-LumiNova X1, and the sheer volume of luminous material makes the dial of the 20.01 S3 glow like the mothership from Close Encounters Of The Third Kind.
The Mosaic dial in the 20.01 S2 was passively illuminated; in the 20.01 S3 it glows under its own power. In a way it’s a shame MING already used the name “starlight” for the 37.01, although there’s still time to name the S3 “Galaxy” – the voids and lume are irresistibly reminiscent of a spiral galaxy.
One Dial, Many Faces
The Agengraphe caliber has been finished in rose gold, with perlage on the components visible from the dial side, and here is where things get interesting. I used the word “maximalist” before and then sort of disowned it as a valid adjective for the 20.01 S3, but there is no doubt that this is a watch very rich in visual detail, and a valid question is the degree to which it’s legible and functional as a chronograph. As much as it might seem as if I’m abdicating on my responsibility to offer an opinion, I can’t – not without seeing the watch. Ever since I started writing about watches I’ve always felt that to one degree or another, formulating a definitive opinion – even a first approximation definitive opinion – about a watch, is something you really can’t do without seeing the watch in person and the more sophisticated the design, the more this is true. One thing that seems abundantly clear about the 20.01 S3 is that how the watch “reads” visually, and what details are highlighted, is very much dependent on the amount, angle, and intensity of incident light; under three different lighting conditions it can look like three different watches.
I’m hoping to be able to see the watch in person in a few days at Geneva Watch Days, but even from the press photos I think it’s clear that this is going to be a really powerfully rich visual experience – and technically fascinating to say the least. Certainly legibility is something the MING team had in mind while designing the watch – the minute hand, for instance, does not have any central lume which actually helps it stand out better in the dark against the glowing voids on the dial, and contrast well with the hour hand.
It is certainly a watch that pushes limits in a lot of ways – technical and design limits as well, but I think it’s one of the most remarkable watches MING has ever produced. This is a watch that could not have existed at any other point in watchmaking history. The laser and glass technology didn’t exist, and Super-LumiNova in all its forms is a fairly recent development as well. To this day, since the first luminous SLN-type pigments were invented by Nemoto in Japan, in 1993, the material has largely been relegated to improving nocturnal legibility but it has enormous unrealized potential as a pure design element as well, and unlike radium (highly hazardous; the radiation burns out the pigment fairly rapidly) or tritium (ten year half-life and therefore unsuitable as a permanent design element) SLN seems to be extremely chemically stable and capable of lasting more or less indefinitely.
The MING Special Projects Cave is a sort of prototyping category, which sits aside from MING’s standard (if there is such a thing) watch production and the Projects sometimes lead to larger production runs (this was the case with the Mosaic dials) but sometimes not. There seem to be practical limits to creating the 20.01 S3 dial – for one thing MING says that the voids were hand-filled – all six hundred of them in all 20 watches, which makes for twelve thousand voids and whoever filled them, I hope the folks at Femtoprint bought him an extra beer for lunch. The question with MING SPG watches is therefore always, or often, what comes next but since 2017 MING has been defying expectations and confounding predictions … so we’ll just have to wait and see.
The MING 20.01 S3: Case, 41.5 x 14.2mm, 18K 5N rose gold and grade 3 titanium with 34 individual components; “flying blade” open lugs with DLC coated titanium caseband. Domed sapphire front and back, double AR coated; front crystal etched on its underside with luminous indices and scales. Dial, 1.3mm thick fused “topographical” borosilicate dial, with 600 hand filled voids; hands coated with Super-LumiNova X1. Rigid case without spacer rings machined to fit the movement exactly; water resistance, 50M.
Movement, Agenhor for MING AgenGraphe cal. 6361 M1, 34mm x 5.35mm, central chronograph with proprietary coupling mechanism; hand-wound with two skeletonized barrels and hard winding stop (i.e. no slipping bridle on the mainsprings). 5N rose gold coated bridges with polished anglage; 55 hour power reserve; adjust to six positions.
Strap by Jean Rousseau Paris, 22mm, with “flying blade” rose gold buckle.
Limited edition of 20 pieces; price, CHF 43,500. For more information, visit Ming.Watch.com.