News · Atelier Wen

Atelier Wen and Massena LAB put a hand-engraved gold dial inside a tantalum case

Fifty pieces of the Inflection Shuò, split between rose and white gold dials worked in hand tremblage, all of them housed in 99.9 per cent tantalum.

Hen & Mills Editorial · 4 min read · 19 August 2026

• Massena LAB and Atelier Wen have built a fifty-piece collaboration around solid gold dials finished by hand in tremblage, cased in 99.9 per cent tantalum.
• The California-style layout splits hand-engraved serif Arabic numerals across the top half against hand-calligraphed Chinese numerals across the bottom half.
• The run is split 40 rose gold and 10 white gold at CHF 33,800 excluding taxes, or US$42,250, with deliveries starting in early 2027.

Tantalum has been having a moment for a couple of years now, mostly because it photographs like steel that has been left out in the cold, and mostly on watches where the metal is the entire idea. What nobody had done was pair it with a dial so laboriously hand-worked that the case becomes the quiet half of the conversation. That is the trick pulled off by the Atelier Wen x Massena LAB Inflection Shuò, a fifty-piece run that arrives in two golds and one very stubborn metal.

Thousands of tiny facets, cut by hand, one dial at a time

The dial starts life as a solid 18-carat gold plate and is then handed to the engraver Coralie Mercier, working for the dial house GT Cadrans, who covers it in hand tremblage. The technique involves pushing a graver across the surface while the dial itself is kept oscillating, so the tool leaves behind thousands of irregular facets rather than a clean line. It is unforgiving work, because a single slip ruins a dial that has already absorbed hours, and the resulting texture catches light the way frost catches it on a car roof at dawn.

The name comes from the Chinese character 烁, romanised as Shuò, which carries the sense of sparkling or radiant. That is a fairly literal description of what the finishing does, and it is nice to see a collaboration name that reports on the watch rather than reaching for something grand.

A California dial that had to be reinvented to work in two languages

Laid over that base is a radially brushed sector in gold, arranged in a California-style layout, which is where the collaboration stops being decorative and starts being an argument. Atelier Wen has filled the upper half, hours ten through two, with hand-engraved custom serif Arabic numerals, and the lower half, four through eight, with hand-calligraphed Chinese numerals commissioned specially. The California dial has spent ninety years splitting Roman from Arabic, so using it to split West from East is the rare case of a vintage convention being repurposed rather than simply revived.

Everything is filled in blue to match the blued-steel hands, an outer ring of further tremblage is framed by an engraved huiwen border, and the two signatures are handled with unusual restraint: Atelier Wen sits at twelve in blue, Massena near six in white gold. Look closely and the border motif resolves into the repeating hooked pattern named after the character 回.

The metal that fights back

The case is 99.9 per cent tantalum, 40 millimetres across, and built along an architecture that Atelier Wen describes as almost entirely free of flat planes, drawing on Chinese architectural forms. That is a genuinely awkward thing to ask of tantalum, which is notoriously difficult to machine and worse to finish. A concave bezel and a ridged midcase add the depth, and the payoff is that cold blue undertone the metal has, which reads closer to the grey of a storm coming in over water than to the white glare of polished steel. Water resistance is 100 metres, with a screw-down crown in rose gold.

The bracelet is integrated and follows the same logic, with curved links playing finishes against one another: strong vertical brushing on the outer links, mirror polish on the centre links, and concave polished chamfers running throughout. Tantalum is dense, so this will wear heavier than its 40 millimetres suggest, and anyone who has spent a day in a tantalum case will tell you that the weight is the part you notice long after the colour has stopped surprising you.

A Girard-Perregaux calibre, redrawn to look like weather

Turn it over and the movement is a customised Girard-Perregaux calibre GP03300, which is a sensible piece of casting given how long that house has been making this sort of thing. The bridges have been reshaped into sweeping curves taken from depictions of wind in historical Chinese painting, plated in ruthenium, finished with sharp exterior angles and laser-etched côtes that radiate outwards from the centre. Black-polished screws and a 5N rose gold rotor complete it. It runs at 28,800 vibrations an hour on 27 jewels, with 48 hours in the barrel, which is a working day and the weekend morning after it.

Forty-eight hours is the one specification here that will bother people, and I think the objection is fair without being fatal. Nobody buying a hand-engraved gold dial in a tantalum case is treating this as their only watch, and the winding ritual is arguably part of what you are paying for.

Atelier Wen x Massena LAB Inflection Shuò pricing and availability

The Inflection Shuò is limited to 50 pieces in total, split 40 in rose gold and 10 in white gold, sold through Massena LAB. Both versions carry the same price: CHF 33,800 excluding taxes, listed as US$42,250 on the Massena LAB storefront. Australian pricing has not been announced, which for a run this small is unsurprising. Deliveries are due to begin in small batches in early 2027.

The number that matters most here is ten. A white gold dial in an edition of ten, hand-engraved by one person, is the sort of thing that will be very difficult to see in the metal before it disappears entirely, and that is my only real complaint about the whole exercise. Watches this heavily worked deserve to be looked at, not just allocated.