RETIRED DESIGNER Wynn Wynn Ong has stepped back into the limelight for an exhibition, Distilled, for the 20th anniversary of the Yuchengco Museum. The exhibit was opened on Nov. 6, and will run until March 2026.
While best known for her jewelry, once mostly sold at Ricky Toledo and Chito Vijandre’s Firma boutique, we found out that evening that Ms. Ong had ventured even into furniture and clothing.
While her jewelry was all over the museum’s third floor, so were large carved tables and lamps, made with the same intricacy as her jewelry. Think of a piece called The Chase: a chest of kamagong wood which has metal handles shaped like lizards, all in different positions. It turns out they were all “chasing” a bejeweled insect found within one of the drawers. Then there is a piece called Gilded Cage which lies on a sculpted base of water serpents, surrounded by Asian motifs like peonies and Chinese lions — they all support a copper and wire cage with painted miniatures from the Boxer Codex, while tiny jade ornaments hang all over it.
The show is a retrospective, since Ms. Ong has been in retirement for almost eight years. Prior to that, she ran her studio for 18 years.
On being reunited with her past work, she told BusinessWorld: “They literally are like my children,” likening the year or so process in making each piece, never repeated, to the gestation period in the womb.
Of Burmese extraction but of a global upbringing, Ms. Ong was an educator first (as Vice-Chair of the International School Manila) before becoming a designer. “When you have a different worldview, your mind is much broader,” she said.
When her son went to college in Boston, she said, “I was so bored. I started playing.” She twisted wires and came out with a necklace in the shape of a question mark (also on display at the exhibit). “When I can’t find something that I’m looking for, or want, I decide to make it,” she explained.
“My approach is the same,” she said when asked about the differences between working on small things (jewelry) and big things (furniture). “I’ll study it, I’ll learn how to do it, and how to make the thing that’s in my mind.”
Ms. Ong retired eight years ago to concentrate on developing a property her family acquired in 1992 — her work in the beginning of the new millennium came first. “I love to build. I love to construct,” she said, and, “It’s good to have passions. But if you want to do something, you have to really focus.”
“Something had to give,” she said, adding this new project to a spinal injury she experienced three years prior to her retirement.
Asked if the retrospective has inspired her to come back, she said, “To do it as a full-time business, no.” She’s not averse to making something custom for a close friend, though, but even then, “There’s so many things I want to learn,” she said. “I’m the type of person (who) wants to keep learning.”
And the things she wants to learn range widely — “I want to paint. I want to do things. I want to go back to writing,” she said. — Joseph L. Garcia
