Gilded and silver-plated minaudiere inspired by Philippine rice terraces, with carabao and bird design for clasp
After seven years away from parties and public exhibits, Wynn Wynn Ong returns—not with new work, but with a celebration of what endures. Her retrospective, mounted in honor of Yuchengco Museum’s 20th anniversary, brings together key pieces from her prolific years as an accessories designer and object-maker. Yet for Wynn Wynn, who has long stepped away from her studio production, this moment feels less about legacy than about looking inward.
When museum director and friend Jeannie Javelosa invited her to mount yet another exhibit, Ong hesitated. She had retired, her studio closed, and her pieces scattered across continents and private collections. But the director persisted, assuring her that the museum would handle the packing, shipping, and restoration. After months of deliberation, Wynn Wynn finally agreed—grateful for the chance to reunite her creations and share them once more, this time without the machinery of a working atelier. What holds the show together now is not production but something quieter: time, trust, and memory.
Titled Distilled, the exhibit opens Nov. 6, 2025, spanning 18 years of design, encompassing jewelry, clothing, furniture, objets d’art, and statement lighting fixtures.
Hand-sculpted candlestick tree trunk in silver plate with 24k gold-plated details
The success of these works, Wynn Wynn suggests, lies in a personal process. “My entire psyche was attached to the piece,” she says. “Every piece that I create was something inside me that needed to come out.”
The genesis of each collection came naturally—sometimes sparked by literature, a place newly visited, or a personal engagement that demanded expression. This creative outpouring often found purpose in social advocacy. During her most prolific years, she released an average of 40 pieces per collection, not counting bespoke commissions, with many efforts dedicated to causes such as Pink for Life, I Care, Bantay Kalikasan, Bantay Bata, and Hands On Manila.
The exhibit traces the evolution of Wynn Wynn’s design language, beginning in 2001 with her foundational wire and stranded work. Over time, her creations became more structured, incorporating lost-wax casting, a technique she discovered through self-directed research in libraries long before information was easily available online. The lost-wax process involves sculpting a wax model, melting it out of its mold, then pouring molten metal into the cavity it leaves behind. This ancient method allowed the designer to achieve the organic, fluid forms that standard fabrication could never replicate.
Inverted pyramid drawer with gecko handles
As her practice matured, so did her curiosity with materials. An enameled series produced large, elaborate belt buckles shaped like frogs, snakes, and geckos—colored, textured, and set with gemstones. Her creative ambitions soon extended beyond jewelry. Desiring vessels for her home, she collaborated with Italian and Taiwanese resin companies to produce limited-edition bowls and houseware, transforming private whims into tangible, collectible design.
In 2005, a collaboration with architect Eduardo Calma, who was renovating her home, sparked another shift. Their dialogue on structure and space inspired a new jewelry line that was starkly minimalist and geometric, echoing Calma’s architectural sensibility.
Pineapple pendant earrings with hand-crafted bamboo houses set with Brazilian citirne, garnet in vermeil
Each piece in the series was named after an architect whose work reflected its aesthetic. The jewelry resembled miniature structures—some like steel beams, others like foundational slabs. One standout, a crocodile wristband named for Santiago Calatrava, featured a square supporting an extended rectangle of carabao horn accented with mutilated quartz, embodying the cantilevered drama of its namesake’s buildings.
In 2005, a collaboration with architect Eduardo Calma inspired a new jewelry line that was starkly minimalist and geometric
By 2009, Ong’s creative trajectory culminated in two parallel, nature-inspired collections that defined her brand’s maturity. The first, All Bark No Bite, consisted of cuffs that simulated the mottled, craggy texture of acacia tree bark. Each was hand-sculpted in wax and cast in metal using the lost-wax process. With polished gold interiors, the cuffs often hosted miniature scenes such as a wasp caught in a web, both rendered in gold, that hinted at the tension between beauty and predation.
The second, To Sea or Not to See, took inspiration from her time on the beach in Batangas, exploring sea life from protozoa to clam shells. Together, the two collections—earthbound and marine—formed a dialogue between land and sea.
Cuff simulates bark with gold spider web and wasp
These works caught the attention of editors during a New York exhibition. Two years later, Ong received major recognition when two of her pieces appeared on the cover of Women’s Wear Daily: Stella, a cuff resembling walnut bark adorned with a jeweled spider, and Naughty Boy, a nautilus-shell clutch lined with 800 individually knotted pearls, later sold to a prominent collector.
For many of Wynn Wynn’s clients, her creations transcend adornment. “They tell me their pieces sit on the coffee table in the living room,” she says, “treated like objets d’art.”
Lighting entered Wynn Wynn Ong’s repertoire a decade into her design career, when a friend coaxed her into creating fixtures for a home renovation. Although she had never done lighting, curiosity won out. After consulting lighting experts, she designed a series of wall lights for a long hallway leading to the living and dining areas.
Inspired by the Tubbataha Reefs, the fixtures resembled an underwater wall dive, with sculpted corals, barnacles, and jeweled sea creatures divided into “day” and “night” scenes. For the dining room, she created several brass-and-copper sconces shaped like mangrove branches to complement a mural of galleons sailing across old Manila Bay.
She wanted the glass to resemble the convex globes used in Victorian gas lamps, but when none could be sourced, she improvised, cutting the bottoms off Tanduay rum bottles. Their curved bases caught and reflected light beautifully. Each fixture was then finished with gold leaf and brushed back to a distressed patina, giving the lamps a timeworn, elegant character.
Her personal lighting piece, Malakas and Maganda, is a gold-leafed chandelier made of hand-formed copper and brass elements that mimic overlapping bamboo trees. Each vertical member, over six feet long, hangs slightly askew, forming a suspended composition about 11 feet wide. Within the structure, miniature silver figures enact scenes from Filipino folklore—a manananggal hovering over a nipa hut that shelters a pregnant woman, an old man walking nearby, and a kapre lounging under the tree. The tableau glimmers, midair, like a myth retold in metal and light.
Driven by her frustration over not finding unique hardware, Wynn Wynn turned her imagination to furniture, creating a small, distinctive line of strangely shaped cabinets.
These pieces were as much narratives as they were functional, often centered on whimsical, jeweled handles. For an inverted-pyramid cabinet, she designed gecko handles set with carnelians and smoky quartz. The piece, titled The Chase, featured the lizards frozen in pursuit of one still gecko. Opening the cabinet revealed the payoff—the still one guarded a jeweled insect, the prize at the end of the hunt.
Art Deco cabinet with ram horns as handles
Other one-of-a-kind pieces followed, including an Art Deco bar cabinet anchored by a magnificent, jeweled ram’s head. Split down the middle, its twin halves functioned as handles that rejoined perfectly when the doors closed, the horns meeting in symmetry. Another design combined layers of inlaid carabao horn, finished with a bleached and polished cow femur handle.
Perhaps the most ambitious piece was a cabinet entirely covered in thousands of mussel (tahong) shells—nearly a hundred kilos’ worth. Wynn Wynn distributed the mussel meat to friends and staff, asking them to return the shells. Each was then cut into two-by-one-inch tiles, their curved sections selected and assembled into a shimmering mosaic. It was completed with jeweled handles and tiny frogs perched on top, turning a humble material into something luminous.
These sculptural cabinets, long kept in private storage, will once again take the spotlight in her retrospective.
Memento moris series of earrings with miniature paintings
After exploring cabinetry, Wynn Wynn returned to jewelry with a concept rooted in art and history. A collector of antique jewelry, she was fascinated by Victorian and Edwardian memento mori, intimate tokens of remembrance once painted with the eye or lips of a loved one. “They might seem a little ghoulish,” she admits, “but I’ve always found them beautiful.”
Silk corded choker with a pendant with a carved mother of pearl octopus, galleon ship. Set with smokey quartz, mabe pearls in rose gold
Fascinated by the Victorian and Edwardian tradition of memento mori jewelry, Wynn Wynn adapted its intimate sentimentality into a Philippine context. Instead of mourning portraits, she created miniature oil paintings—each no larger than an inch square—on mother-of-pearl, framed in gold, and accented with gems like tourmaline and peridot. These tiny works, designed as earrings, transformed history into wearable art.
She created miniature oil paintings—each no larger than an inch square—on mother-of-pearl, framed in gold, and accented with gems like tourmaline and peridot, transforming history into wearable art
Her Archipelago series depicted scenes from the nation’s past: Magellan and Lapu-Lapu facing off, 16th-century Chinese traders, and ilustrados in colonial dress. Some pieces showed a woman in a Maria Clara gown and a man in a barong, while others echoed the original Victorian inspiration with painted lips and eyes. Together, they formed a jeweled tableau of memory, culture, and identity.
Her next challenge was fashion. For Metro Society magazine’s Metrowear Icon 2016 show, Wynn Wynn was asked to create clothing inspired by her jewelry—despite having no background in garment construction. It was, she says, an act of artistic conviction rather than design experience. She was determined that the garments reflect her own aesthetic, not the designer’s.
Through Slim’s Fashion and Arts School officials Mark and the late Sandy Higgins, she found her ideal collaborator in Milka Quinn, a Savile Row–trained professor whose technical precision matched Wynn Wynn’s uncompromising vision. “Milka knew what she was doing,” Wynn Wynn says. “She understood exactly what I wanted and never tried to impose her own thing. She was confident enough to just execute the vision as I saw it.”
The resulting garments were wearable sculptures. Fabric served merely as a stage for the jewelry, each element conceived as part of the body’s architecture. “It’s not an inert piece of clothing,” she explains. “It’s my jewelry that is creating the outfit.”
One standout piece was a gown with a dragon spanning the entire back, rendered in repoussé and gold leaf and anchored by a massive emerald. Another was a vest woven from silk and leather cords, with tiny monkeys clambering across the surface as though they were the ones weaving the threads.
Wynn Wynn also designed three sculptural garments that blurred the line between couture and art. The first, a gold jacket inspired by filigree, was handcrafted in her studio and held together with nude cords. The second, a corded skirt, told a playful story of nature, its woven surface hid tiny nests, spiders, and eggs originally made from real quail shells that she drained with a hot needle and covered in gold leaf. When the shells eventually crumbled, she replaced them with gilded Easter eggs.
The third, a black gown made from parachute cords over 60 meters of tulle, shimmered with jeweled snakes of silver, pearls, and labradorite slithering in and out of the cords.
Wynn Wynn’s final major exhibition—her self-described “swan song”—took place in 2018 at the Metropolitan Museum of Manila during Metro Society’s inaugural KaLIKHAsan Ball, which celebrated Bantay Kalikasan’s 20th anniversary.
Titled Sa Dagat at Bundok (Of Sea and Mountain), a phrase drawn from the Philippine national anthem, the six-month exhibition was a tribute to the country’s natural world. It brought together art installations, jewelry, and minaudières inspired by native flora and fauna, each piece reflecting the interplay between craftsmanship and the environment.
Hand-sculpted ring with a bahay kubo and village animals in vermeil
Among the most intricate works were vermeil rings, each depicting a vignette of Filipino life within a one-square-inch tableau. These miniature scenes—painstakingly sculpted over several days—showed figures engaged in bayanihan, carrying a bahay kubo, or women walking in a Flores de Mayo procession. Every element was rendered in silver plated with 24-karat gold, capturing the intimacy of daily life in precious form.
The exhibit also served a philanthropic purpose. To support the conservation efforts at the La Mesa Dam Eco Park in Quezon City, Wynn Wynn donated six pieces for auction. The items ranged from a large narra cabinet embellished with jeweled frogs to a ring, representing the full range of her artistry, from monumental design to delicate miniatures.
When Wynn Wynn was reunited with her pieces, what came back to her was not only the artistry, but the long process of shaping both the work and the people behind it. Her pride extended to the team she had trained from scratch. Former construction workers, a cook, and young people from the Pangarap Foundation had no background in jewelry-making. She preferred to start with blank slates rather than artisans burdened by “preconceived notions.” What mattered most to her was attitude and openness. “You have to be flexible. You can’t be onion-skinned,” she often told them, reminding her team that critique was a tool for growth, not a personal attack. Under her guidance, they learned to refine their craft until they could translate her most exacting visions into exquisite form.
Wynn Wynn describes her motivation as an intense need to create: “I wanted to exorcise the things inside me.” That drive led her to tackle everything from jewelry to lighting, designing lamps “simply because I didn’t like the ones I would see.” She calls it “exorcising your design demons,” a phrase that captures both the restlessness and release that art provided her.
Recognition, she insists, was never the goal. “Every single thing that happened was icing on the cake for me,” she says, recalling how the acclaim came as a surprise. She had no plans to be featured in magazines or museums. The work began as a midlife project. It was an outlet after years of teaching at the International School and serving on foundation boards that evolved into something far greater than she imagined.
Her passion came with its discipline. Wynn Wynn was often the first to arrive and the last to leave the studio. After fracturing her back in an airport slip, she spent a week in the hospital, checked out, and returned to work by the 10th day. The focus that fueled her artistry also demanded sacrifice—time away from family and friends.
Now that her jewelry career has ended, she has turned to her other enduring love: construction while expanding her beach property.
“What a wonderful time that was,” she says. “Some of my girls still come back to help now and then. They tell me, ‘Ma’m, we miss it,’ and I do, too. We were a family, and it was such a joy to go to work every day. But it’s time to move on. Life is impermanent, and as a Buddhist, I’ve learned that nothing lasts forever. At this stage, I’m drawn to what’s spiritually fulfilling—my husband, my children, my four grandsons. It’s no longer about material things, but about living a life rich in emotional meaning.”
