Who is artist Pio Abad?

Influenced and inspired by the political landscape of the country of his birth and the impact that had on his family, Abad has become known for his multi-art-form works and projects that mine often repressed historical events to present new threads of understanding and counter-narratives.

In July 2025 Abad joined us at the Southbank Centre for a discussion on political histories as part of our four-day celebration of East and South East Asian arts and culture, ESEA Encounters, offering an opportunity for all of us to learn a little bit more about this fascinating artist.

He was born in the Philippines

Born in Manila in 1983, Pio Abad is the first son of Florencio ‘Butch’ Abad and Henedina ‘Dina’ Razon-Abad. Pio was raised in the Philippine capital during a period of significant political unrest and upheaval in the country as the People Power Revolution ended the rule of Ferdinand Marcos, but the debts of the dictatorship continued to impact daily life. Abad would leave the Philippines in 2004, but his work remains deeply informed by unfolding events in the country, and is often concerned with the entanglement of the personal and the political. 

Charles Rennie Mackintosh drew him to Glasgow

In 2004 Abad chose to leave the Philippines to further his artistic studies and set his sights on the UK. ‘Glasgow, being a more manageable city than London, seemed like a perfect fit,’ he explained, in an interview for the British Council website. ‘It was initially the architecture that drew me to the Painting and Printmaking course at Glasgow School of Art. The opportunity to have a studio inside Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s building was a huge draw’.

He found a great deal of inspiration by the Clyde

Glasgow had a great effect on Abad, as he told the Fleming Collection in a 2024 interview, ‘any sense of possibility I had as an artist was shaped by those years at Glasgow School of Art. At that time… there was still a fair amount of cultural funding, so people were just making stuff… I remember seeing an exhibition by Karla Black in a flat in Buchanan Street, and a few years later she was nominated for the Turner Prize’. Expanding on this in an interview with Art & Market, Abad said ‘I learned that it was possible to live as an artist from seeing it first-hand through ones whom I still really admire, such as Cathy Wilkes and Simon Starling’. It was also whilst studying in Glasgow that Abad met his wife, the jewellery designer Frances Wadsworth Jones, a collaborator in art (on works such as ‘For The Sphinx’, pictured below) as well as in life; their first child was born in 2024.

These days you’ll find him in South London

After Glasgow, Abad was lucky (and undoubtedly talented) enough to secure a place on the Royal Academy of Arts’ MA in Fine Art, from which he graduated in 2012. His final show at the RA led to an invite to exhibit at Gasworks Gallery in Oval, which in turn led to becoming one of Gasworks’ studio artists, and subsequently led to him becoming a Gasworks trustee. ‘Gasworks plays an important role in providing artists, particularly from the global South, a platform and a community in London and I am very honoured to play some part in shaping that role,’ he told Art & Market in 2020. Abad moved on from his Gasworks studio in 2022 (and his trusteeship in 2023), but is still based south of the river, with a studio in Woolwich.

Art runs in the family

Pio isn’t the first Abad of the art world, as he is the nephew of US-based artist Pacita Abad. Pacita only took up art in her mid 20s, after she met and then married the artist George Kleiman whilst living in San Francisco. Kleiman introduced Pacita to painting, and her relationship with art would far outlast that with Kleiman. Pacita’s primarily painted works would be exhibited in more than 200 venues around the world, including 75 solo shows. It was Pacita that encouraged Pio to leave the Philippines to pursue his artistic studies, and now Pio serves as curator of his late aunt’s estate.

As too does activism

At the time of Abad’s birth, the Philippines was under the rule of Ferdinand Marcos. It was through protests against the corruption and brutality of this dictatorship that Abad’s parents met, each part of a group of young social-democratic activists. Opposing dictators is of course not without unpleasant consequences. ‘Before I was born [my parents] had spent some time on the run, they had been imprisoned, and my eldest sister was incarcerated with them when they were held under campus arrest,’ Abad has said, in an interview for the Fleming Collection, adding ‘On a deeply personal family level, Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos shaped so much of my life.’

The Marcos family have also shaped many of Abad’s works

Abad has drawn on, and highlighted, the ills and impact of the Marcos family in several of his works, including his graduate thesis presentation at the RA, 1986 – 2010, which looked at political narratives surrounding the Marcos dictatorship through a collection of speculative and real artefacts. The title referred to the year of the People Power Revolution (1986), and the year in which Imelda Marcos gifted Abad’s father (the two were both then members of the Philippine Congress) a seashell clock.

Similarly The Collection of Jane Ryan and William Saunders is a project begun in 2014, spanning 10 years and a number of exhibitions, that, as Abad’s website explains, draws attention to the roles that certain artifacts have played in the recent history of the Philippines, specifically in shaping the cultural legacy of the Marcos dictatorship. The title of this project comes from the false identities used by Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos when they registered an account with Credit Suisse Zurich in 1968 in order to transform $10 billion from the Philippine treasury into private wealth.

His work has unintentionally begun to blur fact, fiction and history

For several of the iterations and exhibitions of his decade-long Marcos project, Abad has produced depictions and replicas of artefacts acquired by the Marcos family. So many in fact that, as detailed in a piece by Ocula, towards the end of the project, Abad would often find his own ‘poor copies’ cropping up in his research. 

You may have encountered his work on your commute

Or perhaps more accurately, on your way home from a night out. In 2017, Abad was commissioned to create the cover of the second edition of the London Underground’s pocket Night Tube map. Abad found inspiration in the Transport for London’s Lost Property Office, where he encountered Eddie, a stuffed gorilla in a Hawaiian shirt that had somehow been once forgotten on the Tube. Abad chose to depict Eddie in a detailed linear style using the colours of the Underground lines in a work that proved hugely popular, and also cemented Eddie as a de facto mascot of the night network.

Or you’ll know him from his Turner prize nomination

In 2024 Abad presented the solo exhibition To Those Sitting in Darkness at Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum which explored, identified and illuminated objects the artist found in the rich and varied collections of the University of Oxford. Concerned with colonial history and cultural loss, the exhibition offered a powerful critique of the way many museums collect, display and interpret the objects they hold. It also saw Abad nominated for the Turner Prize, with the prize jury being particularly ‘struck with how To Those Sitting in Darkness chimed with inscription and incision. Though he may not have landed the overall prize, the nomination represented a huge moment for Abad on an upward trajectory that only looks set to continue.