Pio Abad’s solo exhibition begins, paradoxically, with a work by another artist: The Bridge (To Sonny Rollins), a hard-edge painting from 1981 by Leo Valledor. This prologue to the main act serves a number of purposes. It connects the show to its site through a local artist (Valledor spent much of his life in San Francisco). It reminds us of the impossibility of divorcing art from politics: while the painting is a formal, abstract work with no apparent agenda, the accompanying text posits that Valledor’s lack of wide recognition as compared to his (white) peers was most likely related to his race (like Abad, he was of Filipino heritage). It also introduces Abad’s technique of deploying individual stories to deliberate on historical moments. Over the past seven years, Abad’s work has engaged, both directly and obliquely, with the cultural legacy of the kleptocrat Ferdinand Marcos, who ruled the Philippines with an iron fist from 1965 to 1986. Themes of mythmaking, collective memory, and amnesia are explored in this exhibition without dogma. Instead, Abad expresses the absurd cruelties of authoritarianism through quietly persuasive, poetic works. He plucks objects from history and expands their meanings through shifts in form and …