ART STRAP

At a certain point in time Eng Tay was looking for a handmade strap for one of his vintage Panerai watches and Kok Peng Lim offered him to try to make one for him. With limited tools he created his first strap that looked acceptable. A few months later Eng Tay brought leather ammunition pouches from New York for him to create more straps. This was a turning point for Kok Peng Lim as he fell in love with the straps he created and needed his own watch to fit a strap like that.

He looked for a watch that would suit an ammo strap best in watch magazines and came to the conclusion that Panerai watches are the best match for these kind of straps.

When he asked Eng Tay to help him find the right Panerai model, he got a shocking reply that a Seiko watch would do and is practical enough. But he insisted on getting his own first Panerai and it had to be a special one, a limited edition.

His first Panerai is a PAM00232 Radiomir. This is in the meantime added with a PAM00249, PAM00382, PAM00360 and a PAM00634. All these models are Panerai Limited Editions and the reason for the start of his journey into strap making.

Until now, he is continuously making straps for himself and some of his friends. All these years he got his satisfaction from making a strap that will impress himself, and not for making money.

As an true artist he keeps improving himself , just like the way he is practicing on his painting art works, that also means that any work that does not make him happy or he is not satisfied with, he will not hesitate to destroy it.

As a passionate Panerista he has been meeting a lot of fellow Paneristi around the world making new friends.

Kok Peng Lim has recently started creating his art on straps, a new concept. This sounded very interesting. Most of the straps he started creating were paintings of animals, from pets to tigers and dragons.

I asked him to create a strap for me with is original art on it, that brings the strap closer to the creator. During my last trip to Malaysia I was fortunate enough to meet Kok Peng Lim over dinner and he handed over the strap to me.

By coincidence Jose Pereztroika was also in town, a great opportunity to meet up with him as well, Jose is known for his in-dept analysis of various vintage Panerai watches and other brands. Here he wears a rare Eterna Super Kontiki from the 1964-1965 also used by the Marina Militare. If you like to know more about his work, go to perezcope.com

When opening the box, the art on the box was replicated on the strap, never seen anything like this before. The straps looks glossy and at the same time very mild painted. The colors are not screaming. The rooster on top of the long part is of course jumping out.

The strap as it is hand-painted looks on both the short and long side color-wise very much in sync. When you look from a distance it has a bit of a blended brown green color as base color. The moment you look closer you realize that the strap is painted in multiple layers just like a canvas painting that gives all kinds of different color effects only a true artist can create. The details are extreme, the small elements added like the leaves are full with detail, the moon on the short side means gentleness and brightness in Chinese, is made and looks like a wearing-off effect, also when you look closer you clearly see it is not.

The art shown on the box and the strap has an old Malayasian Chinese tradition, a rice bowl and a rooster. The rice bowl stands for "earning a living" where the rooster stands for "vitality & energy".

The thickness of the strap is around 3.5-4mm thick and has small holes that just can be fitted with the Panerai tubes like it is one with the strap. The sides are painted in dark brown.

The strap is very soft and bends easy from the start, there is no need to break in the leather. Although this is a tapered 26-22mm strap it doesn't look thin at all and fits nice around the wrist.

Below you find summarized the specifications of the strap, the prices mentioned are only indicative just to give you an idea what you could expect if you order one.