THE JOURNAL
In association with IWC Schaffhausen, we spend a day with global entrepreneur and seasoned traveller Mr Ivan Pun.
For many, international travel is a professional habit that develops in later life. But Mr Ivan Pun has been zipping from airports to hotels since childhood. “I had a very global upbringing,” says Mr Pun, a Chinese-Burmese entrepreneur, arts patron, and Member of MR PORTER’s Style Council, who splits his time between, well, everywhere. “I’ve really grown up between Asia and Europe, spending the holidays in Yangon and Hong Kong, but I came to school in the UK. From nine onwards, I was here in England most of the time, and then I’d go back to Asia occasionally.”
The itinerant approach is something Mr Pun has taken wholeheartedly into adulthood: after stints spent working in London, New York and Beijing, he founded Pun + Projects, a startup that manages a portfolio of up-and-coming restaurants and lifestyle brands that operate mainly in Yangon. Now, his working life takes place wherever he wants it to. “After I started my own company, I no longer had to stay in one place, so I learned how to work remotely,” he says. “I’ve always been a very urban person. I always want to be on the move, and I now get to do that with my work.”
Meeting us in London to provide an insight into his thoughts on travel, Mr Pun has only recently returned from a ski trip to Switzerland – he’ll be flying to Hong Kong later that evening for work. If he feels tired, he doesn’t show it. “I don’t really drink coffee,” he says brightly in his terribly proper British accent, chatting animatedly as though he’s had three double espressos. How does he manage it? “You do eventually get used to it, and I try to maximise my time when I’m travelling,” he says. “I much prefer overnight long flights than medium flights – if I get one in the night, I can sit down, read a bit, catch up on some work and go to sleep. But on a short flight that’s six hours or so, you don’t know what to do with yourself.” When he lands, Mr Pun will get started planning an itinerary, and, if he’s in London, spend the morning catching up with Asia, where it’s later in the day. “Hong Kong is halfway through their day when London wakes up, so when I’m working I always have to be conscious of that, but also make sure I engage with the city I’m in at the time,” he says.
As well as getting enough sleep and timing his emails right when working across time zones, Mr Pun’s international lifestyle is about making sure he’s always where the action is. “I get terrible FOMO,” he laughs, “So whenever I’m away, I constantly want to be where I’m not. I try and make enough time so that I get to visit different places often. If I haven’t been to London for like three months, I have to go there and see what’s happening. My parents think I’m crazy, but I’ll block a week off to go to this place or that place, just to see what’s going on.”
For Mr Pun, “finding out what’s going on” often means seeking out art galleries or exhibitions in the city. In London, for instance, he likes the Serpentine Galleries in Kensington Gardens, or the contemporary Jerwood Space, hidden away in Bankside. “Discovering independent art galleries is something that I really like doing, especially those ones that are tucked away,” he says. “I love stumbling across things that I didn’t even know were there, even though I’ve been to these places so many times.”
Between catching up with friends and colleagues across multiple time zones, Mr Pun says that the best parts of travelling are when it’s quiet. When he can steal a moment to himself, Mr Pun enjoys just having the time to calmly absorb his surroundings, especially in London: “I find London a lot more chilled than, say, Hong Kong. In some ways they’re complete opposites – Hong Kong is a lot more of an efficient bustling city and everything’s always open there, but in London, you can choose to retreat.”
**Mr Ivan Pun wears an IWC Schaffhausen Portugieser Automatic 42.4mm Stainless Steel And Alligator Watch **