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HONG KONG — In the early 1990s, Carson Chan persuaded the owner of an automobile garage in Los Angeles to allow him to work there without pay in exchange for access to its jacks, hoists and air compressors.

Mr. Chan spent long hours there, tinkering on the Porsches that he raced on weekends at tracks around Southern California. “You’re in an environment that if you kind of like cars, you’ll dive right into it, and I did,” he said.

But when Mr. Chan moved back to his birthplace, Hong Kong, in 1997, he was unemployed and automobile-less, he said. So he pursued another mechanical pursuit: building a wristwatch from its parts.

“I found out that all you need is a tiny table and some tools, and you could work on it like a car,” he said.

Two decades later, Mr. Chan, 48, is an established figure in Asia’s luxury watch scene. And as head of the greater China mission of the Fondation de la Haute Horlogerie, a nonprofit industry group in Switzerland, he offers watch training courses for watch professionals who target Chinese clients.

Mr. Chan also has a quirky watch collection that includes nearly 100 specimens, some of which he assembled himself from obscure or antique components. He deconstructed several 1936 Rolex pocket watches, for example, and put their movements inside some military-inspired watch cases that he asked a local factory to manufacture.

“What sets him apart is his in-depth technical knowledge,” said Sean Li, the Hong Kong editorial director of Revolution, a luxury watch magazine based in Singapore. “He’s one of the few watch collectors I know who actually has a watchmaking bench where he practices his skills, and gets hands-on experience on what he is teaching.”

A report by the Federation of the Swiss Watch Industry said that although Swiss timepiece exports fell in 2016, monthly export volumes rose in December for the first time in 18 months. It said the China market, which had experienced an upturn since the summer, had also grown that month.

Mr. Chan said one upshot of generally weak watch demand is that prices for new models have been falling. For example, he said, a 2017 Ulysse Nardin Marine Tourbillon Grand Feu Enamel sells for about 22,000 Swiss francs, or $21,930, but a new version of a similar watch would have cost at least 40,000 Swiss francs in 2013.

Buyers in Asia are taking more of an interest in the technical aspects of watchmaking, in part because they are increasingly buying timepieces for personal use instead of as gifts, Mr. Chan said. But he added that many retailers remained stuck in a discount-driven sales approach that is light on technical specifics and leaves some collectors cold.

That includes him, he said.

“It’s as if you go into B.M.W. and the guy tells you how good it handles,” Mr. Chan said recently at his studio, a refurbished loft on the 15th floor of an industrial building in the Wong Chuk Hang district. “I ask, ‘Have you driven it?’ ” And he says, ‘No, I don’t have a driver’s license.’ ”

Mr. Chan said that he began working in the watch industry in 1999 as the Asia representative for the auction house Bonhams. He said that a former boss and fellow Porsche-racing aficionado in California had given his name to a Bonhams executive who had asked, “Do you know anybody in Hong Kong who knows cars and watches?”

Mr. Chan said his initial work at Bonhams consisted mainly of shipping catalogs around Asia and translating for Chinese-speaking clients. The Asia mailing address in the company’s catalogs from that period was his 400-square-foot apartment in Hong Kong.

That work led to a job in 2003 as the general Asia-Pacific manager for Richard Mille, then a new watch company based in Switzerland. But when he started, he said, the watch market was at rock bottom because the region was recovering from the Asian financial crisis of 1997 and 1998 and a 2003 outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome, known as SARS.

“Nobody cared about watches, so that was a big challenge,” Mr. Chan said. “But then, you know, it depends on whether you’re an optimistic person or not. When things are at the bottom, there’s nowhere to go but up.”

The market eventually took off, Mr. Chan said, and he returned to Bonhams as head of watches and Asia managing director. From 2007 until his departure in 2014, he said, what began as a skeletal operation in Hong Kong grew to one that had 45 employees spread across China, Japan, Singapore and Taiwan.

Mr. Chan said that his strategic approach at Bonhams was to bring new products, such as whiskey, cognac and Leica cameras, to the auction market. He said he also promoted watches by independent brands like Richard Mille and MB&F. “Today the market has changed — all the auction houses are accepting these brands,” he said of such smaller, independent watch labels. “But we did the first push.”

Mr. Chan’s friends say that he takes a similarly independent approach to collecting.

“Every watch he wears has a unique story,” said Winston Koo, a private collector in Hong Kong who has known Mr. Chan for more than 15 years. “That makes me wonder what other horological treasures he has stashed away in his safe.”

On a recent morning at his studio, Mr. Chan spread some of his favorite watches out on a wood table that overlooked his workbench, a cigar humidor, a rack of wineglasses and a pair of vintage Veloset and Moto Guzzi motorcycles.

At one point, he gestured to a pair of watches by the German company A. Lange & Söhne that were made in 1892 and 2004. On first glance, they appeared to have very little in common. But Mr. Chan turned them over and showed that their movements, made of German silver, were uncannily similar.

He also held up some Omega Speedmaster watches from the 1960s — the same model, he said, that Neil Armstrong had worn during his 1969 moonwalk. Mr. Chan said that he had gone through a phase of collecting Speedmasters from the 1960s and 1970s and that he had always been fascinated by their design.

“It looks like they’re from the future, but they were made 40 years ago,” he said.

Mr. Chan said that on a practical level, mechanical watches are clearly outdated in the smartphone era, just as human-driven cars may soon become irrelevant in the era of self-driving ones. However, he said, focusing on the history and technology behind watchmaking may help brands survive for many more generations.

He said the key was learning to see watches as art pieces, not just machines.

“Why do you wear a watch? You don’t need it — you have your phone,” he said. “So it has to connect with the consumer more deeply.”