Lessons in Looking

In Annie Cabigting’s show, the act of looking at an artwork is as much a physical exercise as it is a mental one.

by Sean Carballo
Photos courtesy of Metropolitan Museum of Manila
January 3, 2023

Annie Cabigting at her show at the Metropolitan Museum of Manila.

This is an excerpt from Art+ Magazine Issue 88. To read the full story, get the latest issue available on collectibles by artplus, Shopee, and on select stores of National Bookstore and Fully Booked.

Looking is the great subject of Annie Cabigting’s work. More specifically, she is concerned with those moments when our gaze meets a piece of art, and the reactions – psychological, physical, social – which arise out of that interaction. To look at art – and it’s right there in her latest exhibition’s title – is to partake in an open-ended flow of energies, contradictions, and tensions. A partial retrospective spanning two floors of the Metropolitan Museum of Manila, When we look at art... covers a pair of major series in Cabigting’s practice.

The first series, titled In Storage, features a set of wooden shipping crates, positioning art as a hidden commodity, consigned to mere storage units to be transported, auctioned off, sold, and stashed away. With these installations, Cabigting draws attention to the market forces which keep art unseen, but also to the possibilities that concealment opens up for the looker.

“In the absence of any label and information,” Cabigting said in a recent conversation with Art & Market, “I had instead pasted stickers that show very rough sketches, more like squiggles, of what the paintings inside may look like, leaving the audience to imagine or decipher the images for themselves.” The palpable austerity of the crates is undercut by the playful, whimsical sketches, slyly sabotaging the often formal and stuffy pose of art markets.