The Choo Yilin Gallery: Where Meaning Is Held
Born from five generations in Joo Chiat. a founder’s note.
Most people notice the jade first. Then the diamonds. Very few notice what sits beneath.
Hidden within each of our jade cabochon heirloom rings is the Choo Yilin Gallery, an architectural under-gallery that holds the symbols, geometry, and motifs that define our work. These details are featured in the Before The Modern Ring collection. They are discreet by design, never competing with the jade or the halo above. But they are not incidental. They come from a place that shaped how I learned to see.
For five generations now, my family has lived in Joo Chiat. It is not an abstract place to me, nor a romanticised one. Long before it appeared on global lists of the world’s coolest neighbourhoods or received formal recognition from UNESCO, it was simply where life unfolded. Families grew. Businesses were built. Meals were cooked and shared. Days passed, sometimes unassumingly, sometimes dramatically, and this was home.
It is also where Choo Yilin’s studio was for many years, and where much of our creative language took shape, long before I had words to describe it. What stayed with me most was not decoration, but structure.
The façades are strongly ordered. Repetition, symmetry, and geometry form the backbone of the streetscape. Grids and lattices give the architecture its clarity.
Within this geometry live organic gestures. Floral tiles, botanical plasterwork, painted motifs. These soften the lines and give the buildings their warmth.
Geometry and nature are not in opposition there. They coexist. That pairing shaped how I learned to see and my sense of aesthetics. And it is no coincidence that these same languages surface again and again in our work.
Botanical forms, after all, are universal. Across cultures, leaves and flowers appear in jewellery not merely to adorn, but to symbolise. They mark prosperity, growth, and the passage of life from one generation to the next.
In our jade cabochon heirloom rings, these ideas take three distinct forms within the Choo Yilin Gallery.
The first is the lattice structure, an homage to architectural order and geometry, shaped by the place we come from and recognised across cultures and time.
The second is the organic, diamond-studded botanical motif, echoing softened ornamentation and the human warmth that lives within structure.
The third is the Peranakan tile, carved on the under-gallery of each ring. It is also our Choo Yilin logo.
If you recognise these details, you recognise them. And if you do not, their beauty remains all the same. They are private joys. Fully known only to the giver and the wearer, generation after generation.
May you learn to love the tiniest details, like those found in the Choo Yilin Gallery, as much as the luminous jade cabochons and diamond-studded halos that catch the light. In jewellery, and in life.
Love, Yilin
The Choo Yilin Gallery is expressed throughout our heirloom rings collection, available exclusively on chooyilin.com during the Before the Modern Ring digital trunk show on 7th and 8th March 2026.