Pen Medina returns to his first love

Well-esteemed and award-winning actor Pen Medina joins the (short) rank of film-TV personalities who have participated in art exhibits in the country over the years, Cesar Montano, Yul Servo, Ian Veneracion and Isabel Lopez foremost among them. 

 It is actually rare for Pinoy movie-TV idols to hold solo exhibits and Medina’s PAIKOT IKOT LANG: (Human Condition.ed) The Prelude is one of them. It opens on 30 August at 3 p.m. at Gateway Gallery on the fifth floor of Gateway Tower in Cubao, Quezon City. The exhibit runs until mid-September. 

“Actor. Activist. Artist. After decades away from his first love, Pen Medina returns to painting — sharing a deeply personal body of work born from childhood sketches, vivid dreams, and a lifetime of questioning the human condition,” declares the art card Medina himself posted on Facebook just a few days ago. 

The art card is introduced with the little note, “Gawa ni daughter ko...(This is made by my daughter).” Medina has five sons and only one daughter with wife Victoria “Chupsie” Chupongco-Medina whom Medina met in the late ‘70s as a fellow workshopper at Teatro Kabataan (TK) whose main mentors were Joonee Gamboa and the late Adul de Leon. Actors Angie Fiero and Mars Cavestany were among the TK mentors before Gamboa and De Leon were taken in by TK founder Leni Tinio-Alindada who was also Cabrini School administrator. 

Chupsie and Pen (who was first known as an actor with Crispin as first name) got married early and only Pen pursued acting as a carreer. Chupsie got into business writing for Public Relations firms and communication office of multi-national companies, then turned to business journalism, including being a business editor in a broadsheet. All along, she was giving  birth to more sons than daughters and raising them at a roomy two-storey house in Cubao. Four sons followed their father’s footsteps, the daughter went into a corporate career. The Medinas’ acting sons are Karl, Ping, Alex and Victor. 

Online sources reveal that Pen has children with actress Tess Antonio whom he has been living-in with for some years now. Pen and Chupsie quietly separated about a decade ago, though they never had their marriage annulled. Chupsie uses Medina as surname in all her social media accounts. 

The ex-couple get along well in intimate reunions of a bunch of TK workshoppers at the Chupongco-Medina home in Cubao where Chupsie still lives with some of their sons and only daughter. Gamboa, now in his early 90s, join the reunions which last way past midnight. 

We personally attended the get-togethers as a workshopper at the second year of Pen and Chupsie at TK whose quarters used to be at Cabrini School at the back of Fisher Mall in Quezon Avenue. They attended more workshops than we did. Adul de Leon passed in the early 2000s at the backstage of a play she was acting in. We began holding intimate reunions some years after De Leon’s demise. 

We never discussed the couple’s separation in those reunions. We never asked Pen who he was living in with and how many children they have. We were more curious and excited about the anecdotes of Joonee and Pen with film-TV directors and actors. Both Joonee and Pen are very engaging raconteurs. They tell stories with the refined energy  and sincerity of their acting on-camera. Since we turn up at the reunion as their kindred, not as entertainment journo, we can’t share their very personal anecdotes. Joonee did several films with Da King FPJ, with Fernando Poe Jr. himself at the helm. Joonee also did major roles in Celso Ad Castillo films. 

Pen was in several Ishmael Bernal films, including the iconic Himala. Both Joonee and Pen were not always happy with how they were directed by filmmakers and stage directors--but they may never utter that dismay and disgust sharply in an interview. They were tolerant with their less acting-trained co-actors--as those actors may have been patient with Joonee’s and Pen’s possibly overwhelming luminous performance in many scenes. 

Pen has been posting on his FB shots of his paintings since 2022, including those that show him at work. We find most of those he has posted kind of surreal, dark and brooding. We have not seen them all, so we can’t definitively judge them. Just like his art on camera, we cannot judge with finality his acting until we see the last frame of the movie. We will turn up at the exhibit, though not necessarily at the opening. The gallery is open from 10 a.m. until 6 p.m.