Julia Christine Botin

From beauty to brushstrokes: Vicki Belo-Hayden Kho collection shines at León auction

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<p>In the cosmopolitan lanes of Metro Manila, where beauty is a flourishing business and artistry thrives in private halls, few names evoke the same level of public intrigue and admiration as those of Dr. Vicki Belo and Dr. Hayden Kho. Known to most Filipinos as purveyors of aesthetic perfection through their clinics, the couple has spent the last decade quietly cultivating another kind of beauty — the enduring kind found on canvas.</p><p>This June 7, 2025, at León Gallery’s Spectacular Mid-Year Auction, select pieces from the Belo-Kho art collection will find new homes. For the first time, these works — seen only fleetingly in glossy spreads or background vignettes of video blogs — step into the public eye, allowing collectors and art lovers a rare view into the couple’s refined, if under-publicized, visual taste.</p><p>If there’s any surprise to the sophistication of their collection, it is quickly dispelled by tracing Vicki Belo’s lineage. Born to biological parents deeply embedded in the creative and design industries, Belo is heir to an aesthetic tradition older than her own name. Her father, Engr. Agustin “Toy” Cancio, co-founded Cancio-Calma Associates, a pioneering interior and furniture design firm that played a pivotal role in shaping mid-century Philippine design. Her mother, Conchita Gonzalez Cancio, was a Vassar-educated woman of modern sensibilities. Toy Cancio, alongside such luminaries as Lor Calma, Herminia Cancio Layug, and Edith Oliveros, also co-established the Philippine School of Interior Design (PSID), a cornerstone institution in the development of Filipino design education.</p><p>Raised by her adoptive parents, Florencia “Nena” Singson Gonzalez Belo and the prominent lawyer Atty. Enrique Belo, Vicki still bore the visual imprint of the Cancio-Gonzalez heritage. Her maternal grandmother, Rosario “Charing” Chiong-Veloso Singson Gonzalez, lived in a mansion brimming with classicist elegance in Dasmariñas Village — part of a Cebuano lineage so wealthy they maintained a pied-à-terre along Paris’s Boulevard Haussmann. Paris would eventually become Vicki&#x27;s spiritual and aesthetic home, culminating in her operatic wedding reception at the Palais Garnier. The drama of beauty, it seems, runs deep in her blood.</p><p>Kho, while less publicly associated with the arts, has shown a sharp curatorial eye in tandem with his wife. The result is a collection that eschews the trendy for the timeless, one that privileges modernist masterworks and emotionally resonant themes.</p><div><br/></div><div><span class="fr-img-caption fr-fic fr-dib" style="width:950px"><span class="fr-img-wrap"><img src="https://od2-image-api.abs-cbn.com/prod/editorImage/1749003187065Women.jpg" class="fr-fic fr-dib" style="width:950px"/><span class="fr-inner">Women Gleaning (2000) by <em>Anita Magsaysay-Ho </em></span></span></span></div><p>The most compelling pieces in the Belo-Kho collection heading to auction are led by &quot;Women Gleaning&quot; (2000) by Anita Magsaysay-Ho, an intimate square-format oil that captures three women gathering grain in a field. Painted at the turn of the new millennium, this work stands as a lyrical summation of Magsaysay-Ho’s lifelong themes — Filipina resilience, rural memory, and feminine grace — filtered now through a softened palette of bright pastels. Alfredo Roces once observed how, by the 2000s, Magsaysay-Ho’s figures had taken on a “delicate gracefulness.” That is evident here: the gathering women are no longer merely laboring; they seem suspended in a moment of recollection, as if gleaning not just grains but ghosts of a remembered past. </p><div><br/></div><div><span class="fr-img-caption fr-fic fr-dib" style="width:950px"><span class="fr-img-wrap"><img src="https://od2-image-api.abs-cbn.com/prod/editorImage/1749003902154variante.jpg" class="fr-fic fr-dib" style="width:950px"/><span class="fr-inner">Variante Sobre Un Tema de Cassatt (1967) by <em>Fernando Zóbel </em></span></span></span></div><p>Fernando Zóbel, too, commands attention in this selection with his &quot;Variante Sobre Un Tema de Cassatt&quot; (1967), a philosophical conversation across time. Zóbel’s Diálogos series, of which this work is a part, was his self-professed means of “speaking with art using brushes.” In this case, the dialogue is with Mary Cassatt, the American Impressionist best known for her depictions of women and children. Zóbel’s abstraction is both homage and reinterpretation — light shimmering through memory, order distilled through motion. </p><div><br/></div><div><span class="fr-img-caption fr-fic fr-dib" style="width:950px"><span class="fr-img-wrap"><img src="https://od2-image-api.abs-cbn.com/prod/editorImage/1749004424699Crucifixion.jpg" class="fr-fic fr-dib" style="width:950px"/><span class="fr-inner"> Crucifixion (1976) by <em>Ang Kiukok </em></span></span></span></div><p>For those drawn to darker, more visceral themes, the collection offers &quot;Crucifixion&quot; (1976) by Ang Kiukok, a smaller but no less potent work on paper executed in tempera. It is a familiar theme for Kiukok, but rendered here with particularly brutal focus — Christ’s agony radiating from every jagged line and hanging limb.</p><p>Also featured is a watercolor &quot;Nude&quot; (1978) by Cesar Legaspi, its sinuous form and Cubist inflections evoking the tension between figuration and fragmentation. Unlike Kiukok’s overt pain or Magsaysay-Ho’s serenity, Legaspi’s work captures the push and pull of modernist desire — his figures often caught mid-dissolution, as though battling their own outlines.</p><p>The inclusion of these works suggests that the Belo-Kho collection understands how art lives not just in frames, but in the slow accretion of taste, memory, and identity. In fact, their collection might be read as a portrait of postwar Philippine modernism itself — from the lyrical feminine to the experimental and the metaphysical.</p><p>In that way, it mirrors the logic of beauty clinics themselves: art and beauty both require renewal, transformation, and care.</p><div><br/></div><div><span class="fr-img-caption fr-fic fr-dib" style="width:950px"><span class="fr-img-wrap"><img src="https://od2-image-api.abs-cbn.com/prod/editorImage/1749004978207Vicente Manansala - From the Market.jpg" class="fr-fic fr-dib" style="width:950px"/><span class="fr-inner">Vicente Manansala’s From the Market (1975) </span></span></span></div><div><br/></div><div><span class="fr-img-caption fr-fic fr-dib" style="width:950px"><span class="fr-img-wrap"><img src="https://od2-image-api.abs-cbn.com/prod/editorImage/1749004998965HR OCAMPO - Miners.jpg" class="fr-fic fr-dib" style="width:950px"/><span class="fr-inner">H.R. Ocampo’s modernist Miners (1952) </span></span></span></div><p>Marking its 15th year, León Gallery’s “Spectacular Mid-Year Auction” features other masterpieces, such as Magsaysay-Ho’s &quot;Water Carriers&quot; (1947), Vicente Manansala’s &quot;From the Market&quot; (1975), and H.R. Ocampo’s modernist &quot;Miners&quot; (1952). Also up for bidding is Fernando Amorsolo’s historic &quot;The Burning of Manila, once owned by Don Enrique Zóbel.</p>

<p>The famed aesthetic physicians of Manila society open their doors to collectors with a personal cache of modernist gems.</p>

The famed aesthetic physicians of Manila society open their doors to collectors with a personal cache of modernist gems.

From beauty to brushstrokes: Vicki Belo-Hayden Kho collection shines at León auction

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From beauty to brushstrokes: Vicki Belo-Hayden Kho collection shines at León auction

Lito B. Zulueta

Published Jun 04, 2025 11:55 AM PHT

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