In Pain and Joy, a Portrait of All Selves: Pacita Abad at STPI

Pacita Abad rarely published poems. Why, then, was she moved to keep this one? The lines, “O… my baby, O… my girl, O sweet baby…” read like a ditty or elegy. “Pain” and “joy” mirror the dual jubilance and woe of the “tears” streaming to meet her “smile.” The poem’s opening lines anticipate two major series of abstractions: Endless Blues, born of her lifelong love of the blues yet conceived in the shadow of the September 11 attacks, the ensuing war in Afghanistan, and her devastating diagnosis of lung cancer.² The repeated O sings like a folk song, an incantation, or a dirge – utterance into form.

It prefigures the elemental shape she would explore expansively in Circles in My Mind, an ecstatically joyful eruption of colour and texture begun during her 2003 residency at STPI, and a series so ebullient that it’s easy to forget how she forged much of it amid illness and treatments. Two decades later, STPI’s Common Ground, curated by Nathaniel Gaskell, reunites Endless Blues, a series progenitive of Circles in My Mind (Fig. 1), in a time newly attentive to artists of the global South and to Indigenous, diasporic, and feminist practices of making.³

With Endless Blues, Abad crossed into abstraction, exploring the colour blue as both hue and resonance, pigment and pulse. Whether the ultramarine and electric blue of her trapunto paintings or the syncopated rhythms of her jazz muses—Koko Taylor, Ray Charles, Etta James—the “blues” was among her earliest sources of freedom.⁴ In Make love not war!, dots of indigo, mint, mango, crimson, and cotton-candy pink gather like bodies in a plaza, spiralling like light had scattered through a psychedelic haze (Fig. 2). The title recalls the anti-war protests of San Francisco’s Summer of Love, where Abad first made a home after fleeing political retaliation from the Marcos administration. She arrived amid the pulse of the 1970s counterculture, frequenting Minnie’s Can-Do—a Black-owned bar in the Fillmore run by the charismatic Minnie Carrington and remembered as “a safe haven of feel-good, bohemian hipness.”⁵ It was one of many gathering spaces that nourished the creative communities of colour Abad gravitated toward.

Filipina American playwright Jessica Hagedorn later reflected on the creative ferment of that era during a panel for Abad’s retrospective at SFMOMA. One audience attendee reported, “Meanwhile, friends Hagedorn, Shange, and Thulani Davis performed together as the Satin Sisters at bars like Minnie’s Can-Do, where Shange’s choreopoem for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf was workshopped before its Broadway destiny… the Satin Sisters’ art was focused on intimacies and solidarities between African American and Asian women.”⁶ Abad had a keen intuition for such local watering holes—where femmes and baddies gathered amid the legendary beatniks and musicians of the Haight-Ashbury scene. Jazz attuned her rhythm and improvisation, situating her within a distinctly American moment of charged, cross-cultural exchange and blissful utopian aspiration. Immersed in that world, she began the aesthetic awakening that would sustain her creative drive for a lifetime.

Though the blues grounded her within a broader countercultural community, Endless Blues also marked a profound turn inward. During the early 2000s, as she underwent “chop, burn, and poison for eight non-stop months” of lung cancer treatment, she wrote of painting as her “refuge” and the blues as her “best therapy.”⁷ Abad was a meticulous archivist of self; she kept exhaustive journals, sketchbooks, notes, and diaries that captured inspiration and the mundane alike—meetings, dinners, movies, grocery lists, prescriptions, sketches, recipes, newspaper clippings, and fabric scraps—some bound in bespoke batik (Fig. 3). Her handwritten notes from this period—once tight and florid, now unsteady and scrawled—bear witness to both corporeal pain and creative insistence. Her writing and her hand structured her sense of time. To lose dexterity was, in some sense, to lose one’s self. In a planner dated July 2003, she confessed, “... I couldn’t even write my name.”⁸ The circle, then, offered her a pathway back into aesthetic exploration despite increasing disability: a form she could return to, again and again, carrying the discipline of endurance and contemplation, merging rhythm with the waning yet insistent strength of the body.

At STPI, Abad seriously returned to paper for the first time in nearly a decade, revisiting a medium that had always represented freedom in her practice. She had first worked intensively with master papermaker Rick Hungerford in 1986 during her residency at Maryland’s Pyramid Atlantic Art Center, where she was introduced to an array of printmaking techniques, just a few years after developing her personal logo (Fig. 4).⁹ Inspired by her series of the same name, she rendered herself as a mask or spirit: concentric semicircles of tangerine form eyes around forest-green pupils on a cherry-red, heart-shaped face; Ric rac-like squiggles frame a yellow silhouette that cascades downward, forming the hair that falls to her neck, where forest-green dots gather like a beaded necklace.

Earlier in her career, she recalled experimenting with whatever was on hand while waiting for a friend at a restaurant: “I started collecting the paper-wrapped toothpicks on all the tables; each of them, I pasted on my sketch pad. After gluing, I applied gold paint…and began sketching… on… fillboard, blotting, cardboard,… cigarettes packs… rice, banana, roadmaps… newsprints… and many others.”^{10 11} In Korean Toothpicks, gold-tinted wrappers form the ground for rough-edged layers of pink and peach pulped paper and bands of what appear to be shredded photographs of her own work (Fig. 5). Magazine pages and found images alternate rhythmically, revealing her intuitive sense of bricolage. For Abad, paper’s mutability mirrored her own wild spirit: “It gives you unlimited freedom to express yourself,” she wrote.¹²

At STPI, this freedom expanded dramatically. Joining a team of master printmakers, she created over 56 works, using a dizzying range of techniques and materials: screen printing, lithography, linocut, Mylar overlay, painting, assemblage, and STPI’s signature handmade and dyed paper pulp. In many works, she repurposed buttons, glitter, sequins, and old circuit boards. Though deceptively spontaneous, each work was meticulously planned. Sweet Dreams Are Made of This, playfully named after the Eurythmics’ new wave discotheque banger, required over 15 colours and printing plates, each layer interacting through elaborate stencils and their negative cutouts, woven like fine lace. “Nothing was wasted,” one STPI collaborator recounted.¹³ Her paper works curled and crumpled—alive with oil, jewellery, and cowrie shells, the latter drawn from her trapunto vocabulary.  Though working in paper, she, as curator Victoria Sung says, “refused to be flattened to that one medium.”¹⁴ The foil backing visible through cutout circles evokes shisha, the mirror embroidery of Rajasthan, and the cowrie as a diasporic object circulating across Africa and the Austronesian Pacific.

Abad’s STPI works also drew upon an eclectic collection formed through her extensive travels. The dot motifs that recur throughout her work resonate with the visual grammars of Aboriginal Australian painting, an association suggested by painted clapsticks—sometimes referred to as bimli in certain language groups—that she kept among her studio materials (Fig. 6). From this same region, she admired how tapa cloth in Papua New Guinea—like paper—was made from pulped bark, pressed and dried into textured sheets. Bark, she said, could be “cruder, jagged, punctured, and harder.”¹⁵ The material’s toughness found a kinship with the dotted motifs that ripple across her work, echoing the visuality of Aboriginal painting—an ontological system of circles, lines, and arcs through which Tjukurrpa or ‘Dreaming’ stories are represented or made present.¹⁶ For Abad, this kinship suggested affinity rather than imitation. She understood that mark-making could enact ancestral and personal connection, mapping relations across land, lineage, and self. In her hands, tearing, burning, and layering became extensions of her own restless energy and blazing spirit.

For Abad, the circle ultimately linked these material freedoms to a philosophy of renewal. In works from Circles in My Mind—including pieces such as Say Om—the motif functions as symbol, gesture, and motion, encompassing the universe, the mandala, the portal, the cycle, the self, and kalibutan—what Patrick Flores expands on as the concentricity of world and consciousness.¹⁷ Yet her circles were never purely formal; they carried the humour and abundance of daily life: donuts, snails, windows, buns, and bras.¹⁸ Titles like I’m Up and Down Like a Yo-Yo signal the oscillations of everyday existence, the buoyant and the difficult alike. Join the Circle reflects her social and collectivist idealism; while in a notebook, she preserved a short poem from which the title emerged. After “Join the circle”, she wrote “…Plunge into darkness; Plunge into colors…”—a sudden meeting of gloom and bliss.¹⁹ Across these works, the circle becomes an exaltation of the everyday, a meditation on individual and collective wholeness, and a reflection on life’s continual return.

Works from Circles in My Mind became the heart of her final exhibition, Obsession, which travelled to the Cultural Center of the Philippines in 2004. “Alone with my paints and brushes, music day and night, is when I feel most relaxed–this is my therapy. I do not want to do anything but paint–this is my obsession!” she said.²⁰ She spoke of waking at two or four a.m., wondering which shade of yellow to use. In I Woke Up Many Times That Night, bolts of neon yellow, orange, and green thrum across the surface—evidence of those sleepless hours, their energy still vibrating in paint. In a photograph from the Obsession catalogue, Abad sits surrounded by hundreds, perhaps thousands, of painted, printed, and cut circles—smiling yet nearly subsumed by them (Fig. 7).

The image recalls Yayoi Kusama’s self-described “self-obliteration,” in which the boundaries between self, object, and environment melt. Kusama described her creative practice as a way of asserting her “proof of living” and “overcoming illness.”²¹ On her use of repeated circular forms, she wrote:

Round, soft, colorful, senseless and unknowing. Polka dots can’t stay alone; like the communicative life of people, two or three and more polka dots become movement.… Polka dots are a way to infinity.… When we obliterate nature and our bodies with polka dots, we become part of the unity of our environment.… We obliterate ourselves in love.²²

Abad, also keenly aware of Kusama’s international importance,²³ approached the omnipresence with a different philosophical inflection, one that leaned toward reconstitution, dissolving the self only to remake it anew.  Both artists, through repetition and immersion, divulge a radical interdependence of matter and being.

She later carried the methods she developed during her three-month STPI residency into her final public project, Alkaff Bridge (2004). Determined to enliven its “battleship” grey surface, Abad meticulously photographed the bridge from every angle, studying its sensuous curves, trusses, and latticed architecture, noting how its structure framed the movements of those who crossed it. She translated these observations into painted studies on large sheets of paper, working horizontally on the floor much as she had with her trapunto canvases. A studio wall became an evolving board, pinned with her references; nearby, a panel overlaid with trapezoidal paper pieces recalls the Central African Kuba-cloth–like techniques explored in the Endless Blues series. (Figs. 8 a–c) Her old CDs—playing on loop—filled the studio with sound, the roundness of their spinning forms echoing the very motif she was preparing to expand across the bridge’s steel frame. In her desire to transform the bridge’s surface, she rehearsed the project first in paper and collage, assembling an arsenal of material strategies drawn from across her life’s work.

Completed between rounds of radiation and chemotherapy, the bridge transformed a dull grey structure in Singapore into a spectrum of 2,350 circles painted in 56 colours: scarab, tiara turquoise, adriatic haze, emerald sea, lipstick, cactus flower, temple gold.²⁴ The project demanded six months of coordination among government agencies, private companies, and residential developers, including the Singapore Tourism Board (STB), the Land Transport Authority, CPG Consultants Pte. Ltd., and City Developments Limited (CDL)—a bureaucratic feat in its own right.²⁵ Working alongside a specialised rope-access team, Abad climbed and suspended herself from the bridge’s steel beams, painting circle after circle while strapped into harnesses. Photographs from the project show her beaming mid-air, high above the river—her signature cheeriness undimmed, even as she laboured through profound physical strain (Fig. 9). The beloved “friendship” bridge, to Abad, was both metaphor and medium: it linked islands, cities, and selves through a luminous synthesis of the circular language that had long animated her studio work, now translated into public space and cast in technicolour.

Together, the STPI works, and the bridge mark a culmination in Abad’s practice, a moment when decades of experimentation—sewing, stuffing, printing, appliqué, assemblage, pulping, burning, cutting—cohered into a single, radiant syntax. Paper and circle became instruments of release, but also of return: they allowed her to revisit the improvisational instincts of her earliest bricolage while pushing them into newly ambitious, technical, and public forms. Through these materials, she disassembled and re-envisioned her artistic body, breaking the self into fragments only to reorganise it through repetition, beat, and play. The works rise from the surface—wrinkled, puckered, studded with foil and cowrie, heavy with pigment—carrying the same haptic exuberance as her trapunto canvases yet lighter and dynamic. In their layered density, she achieved a material and spiritual freedom, a coherence born from the gathering and re-gathering of the many lives she had lived.

Abad’s final paper assemblage self-portrait, created at STPI, is also her most abstract (Fig. 10). Strings of serialised circles near the “head” resemble braids; dots crowded toward the centre suggest an all-seeing eye; foil-backed holes recall shisha. Splattered paint, floral-print, and printed faux-batik gather into a body. Curved, ric rac ribbon-like “legs” move from the torso to a ground of orange and purple, lined by cowrie shells. Its many patterns and shapes suggest the pounds of fabric she collected, altered, and wore during her life’s sojourn through over 60 countries. Composed of layered pulp and pigment, it suggests a body dissolved and reassembled—what might be called the atomisation of self: the breaking apart of the artist into colour, rhythm, and light. In the portrait, she renders and resynthesises herself with all the parts of her haptic, dimensional, and sensorial lives. Everything, Everywhere, All at Once. It is a portrait of all selves; to abstract oneself is not to disappear, but to proliferate.

While Abad was in the hospital, the STPI staff sent her an oversized greeting card made from handmade paper with deckle edges—materially intimate, like something torn from the studio’s reams (Fig. 11). When opened, it reveals a curlicue–haired, grinning figure rendered in persimmon strokes, her unmistakable smile glowing despite everything. Her arms reach outward as if in an embrace; wrists and ankles shimmer with jewellery drawn as bands of zigzags. Around her, teal, yellow, and lime circles burst outward in a brilliant field. Her name—painted in primary red, blue, and yellow—appears not simply as a signature, but as an affectionate return to her own visual language. The surface is crowded with dedications, inside jokes, flashbacks, and wishes for strength and health. Eitaro Ogawa writes, “This is something I always feel when I work with you. A lot of energy…” Tamae Iwasaki follows, noting how she finds herself matching Abad’s approach, which she calls “a very happy one.” The card becomes a quiet portrait of reciprocity: an image moulded by care, in which the delight Abad carried into the world—so often forged alongside pang—is assembled, reflected, and returned to her, circle by circle. A self-portrait painted by others.

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