Hublot Big Bang Soldier: The Lagos-born, London-based artist’s toy soldier motifs run across the sapphire dial of a limited 50-piece drop priced at $29,200, dropping today.
Leonard Iheagwam, professionally known as Soldier, has become Hublot’s youngest-ever collaborator at 26 with the debut of the Hublot Big Bang Soldier All Black, a 50-piece limited edition releasing today at $29,200 across selected Hublot boutiques and online. Two years in development, the timepiece marks the Lagos-born, London-based artist’s first design with the Swiss watchmaker and comes directly out of a 2024 Champions exhibition he mounted at Hublot’s New Bond Street location in London.
Hublot Big Bang Soldier’s Toy Soldier Dial Architecture
The watch’s visual centerpiece is unmistakably Soldier’s signature move. Toy soldier figures, recurring symbols across his paintings and sculptures including works titled Your Cross to Bare, Your Sins Are Forgiven, and The River, now play across the sapphire dial as actual design elements. They sit against the visible architecture of Hublot’s in-house HUB1280 Unico self-winding chronograph movement, creating a layered visual conversation between the artist’s symbolic language and the mechanical substance of haute horlogerie. The 42-millimeter case and bezel employ microblasted and polished black ceramic, mixing matte and gloss finishes to generate depth within the monochromatic palette. The watch ships on a black fabric strap but includes two additional rubber straps lined in red and green, colors Soldier connects to the present and past respectively.
The caseback carries engraved coordinates pinpointing Hublot’s New Bond Street boutique, the site where the partnership first took shape through his 2024 exhibition. That initial collaboration directly seeded this timepiece commission.
Artist on Displacement and Power
Soldier’s practice, rooted in self-taught multidisciplinary work across painting, sculpture, and visual culture, emerged from a specific defiance. He moved from Lagos to London at 16 to pursue art and skateboarding, and his professional moniker itself was born as a statement against Nigeria’s military establishment. His thematic interests frequently excavate Nigeria’s complex political history.
In his statement on the Big Bang collaboration, Soldier articulated his conceptual approach to the watch directly: “You don’t want to simply decorate something that already has its own language and history. You want to understand it, respect what already exists, and then find a way of introducing another story into it. With this watch, I explore what happens when symbols of power are moved somewhere they don’t traditionally belong.”
That philosophical stance translates into the watch itself. Toy soldiers, typically objects of play or military kitsch, become functional dial architecture within a precision instrument valued at nearly $30,000. The displacement is intentional, deliberate, and central to the work.
Hublot’s Artist Lineage and Unico Movement
Hublot has maintained an artist collaboration program since 2011, generating watches that critics and collectors alike have found deliberately polarizing. The brand has previously partnered with Samuel Ross, Daniel Arsham, Takashi Murakami, and most recently Jeff Koons. Soldier’s entry into this roster at 26 breaks the youngest-collaborator threshold.
Hublot CEO Julien Tornare framed the partnership in terms of the brand’s foundational design philosophy. “What Soldier has done with the Big Bang is not decoration; it is a reinterpretation of our All Black philosophy through his own language,” Tornare said in a statement. “Our in-house Unico chronograph, ceramic mastered in Nyon, and an artist with something urgent to express: this is the Art of Fusion at its most contemporary.”
The Unico movement, handcrafted in-house at Hublot’s Nyon manufacture, represents the technical anchor. The ceramic case and bezel are produced through the brand’s proprietary mastering process, also based in Switzerland. Limited to 50 pieces globally, the Big Bang Soldier All Black arrives as a finite object, positioning both artist and watchmaker within a finite creative conversation rather than an infinite commercial one.
Sources: robbreport.com
