Among countries that have been part of Euro-american colonial empires, such as most of the Southeast Asian region, the quest for independence and self-determination has been pinned to respond to multi-layered urgencies that have been experienced since a collective imagination of a new—that is, anti-colonial—order has been conceived. This quest imbricates the pluralization of the concept of modernity that departs from the tyranny of its industrial connotations, which have for long been the territory of the more developed countries in the Global North. It likewise was a means to identify and position one’s collectivity within a highly political and uneven world of relations and flows. Historically, this quest finds itself irremovably linked with the gesture of figuring the nation; and art, particularly painting, with its Euro-american roots, has been portrayed to be a site of various degrees of hybridization to play a key role in this symbolic gesture. In the process, art is construed to elicit some form of national identity. This lens has been widely used in various historicizations of post-War art in the Philippines since the 1990s, but they appear to be instigated by interpretations from hindsight, that are informed by the aforementioned concepts and that may have relegated the discourses that played out during the period of study within the cracks of untapped art history. In an attempt to address this gap, the paper, focusing on abstraction, examines first-hand accounts from artists and critics from the post-War to the 1970s to surface nuances that literature written in hindsight failed to surface. By doing so, it also elaborates on the complexity and complications of national identity as an analytical concept, which allows the examination of phenomena from a part of Southeast Asia explicate notions that converse with how they developed, operated, and are examined elsewhere.