This Ressence Watch Feels Space-Odyssey Coded but Is Made With Ancient Japanese Techniques

A watch that feels like it carries deep-seeded lore from a galaxy far, far away is exactly what Ressence delivers with the Type 9 IKE, a collaboration with Japanese lacquer artist Terumasa Ikeda.

Ressence is a Belgian independent watchmaker that has spent the past decade rethinking how a mechanical watch might look if it were designed today. There is no crown on the case and no traditional hands sweeping across a dial.

Instead, the brand uses its patented ROCS display system, where the entire dial rotates and smaller discs orbit across its surface like planets circling a sun. Reading the time feels less like glancing at a watch and more like watching a miniature solar system slowly rearrange itself.

The Type 9 is the most compact and stripped-back expression of that idea. At 39mm in titanium, it is the smallest watch in the Ressence lineup, a smooth pebble-shaped object that looks more like a piece of modern industrial design than something pulled from a Swiss archive.

For the Ikeda collaboration, that familiar case receives a black DLC finish that subtly shifts the watch’s personality. The silhouette already carries a slightly extraterrestrial quality, but in black it begins to feel like something you might find on the dashboard of a spacecraft.

The mood lands somewhere between the surface of the Death Star and the kind of object you might present to a galactic overlord after conquering another planet, less costume prop and more restrained sci-fi elegance.

Inside that dark shell is where Ikeda’s work takes over. Known for blending traditional Japanese techniques with futuristic compositions, the artist built the dial using urushi lacquer and raden, the centuries-old method of embedding mother-of-pearl into lacquered surfaces. Because the Type 9 dial is curved, each fragment of mother-of-pearl had to be soaked and slowly bent so it could follow the slope of the surface.

Across the rotating dial, colorful discontinuous lines radiate outward from the central axis of the hour display like a vortex expanding through space. As the watch tracks time, the entire dial completes one full rotation every hour while the hour display performs its own orbit, meaning Ikeda’s composition is constantly shifting.

Small colored squares mark the hour and minute indicators, flashing against the black dial with a strange sense of nostalgia. The effect recalls those black scratch-art papers many of us played with as kids, where hidden colors suddenly appear beneath a dark surface as you scrape away the top layer.

Ressence watches are beautifully simple design objects, and that commitment to design alone lets them exist in the rare space of being effortlessly modern. They feel futuristic not because they are trying to look like science fiction props, but because they approach watchmaking as a design solution to a simple question: what would a mechanical watch look like if it were invented today?

That clarity has also made Ressence an unusually compelling canvas for artists.

Collaborations with Daniel Engelberg, the sand-covered Type 9 created with Ahmed Seddiqi & Sons, the salmon-toned edition produced alongside The Armoury, and even a Type 8 dial woven from indigo-dyed silk thread have each introduced new visual ideas without disrupting the underlying watch.

The Type 9 IKE pushes that idea into cosmic territory. Ikeda’s centuries-old lacquer craft ends up looking like something transmitted from deep space, reinforcing how strong the design of the watch already is.

Limited to just eight pieces and priced around $35,000, the collaboration reinforces something Ressence has quietly proven for years. The watches are compelling on their own, but when the right artist engages with that design language the result can feel almost otherworldly.