Mind Set Art Center is honored to present ANDAMYO: Access and Appearance of Maintenance and Repair, a solo exhibition by Filipino artist Buen Calubayan, as the inaugural formal exhibition at our new space on Ruiguang Road. Marking the artist's second solo presentation with the gallery, the exhibition takes its title from the Filipino word for "scaffolding."Calubayan’s latest body of work moves beyond the technicality of the fix, repositioning maintenance and repair as fundamental structural conditions that dictate how we perceive, navigate, and exist within the everyday. Through this lens, the andamyo becomes a metaphor for the invisible labor and temporary frameworks that uphold our social and physical realities. The exhibition will be open to the public from April 18 to May 23, 2026, with an opening reception on April 18 at 3:30 PM. We warmly welcome your presence.
A scaffold is a temporary framework, typically wood or steel, assembled to support the body and material during the acts of construction, maintenance, and repair. It grants access to heights and voids otherwise unreachable. Yet, scaffolding is never an end in itself; it is a parasitic structure that follows the contours of what is being built or restored. Its presence is a semiotic marker of mobility, incompleteness, or decay. By suspending an object from its intended function, scaffolding transforms functional architecture into a "halted site," becoming a visual emblem of anticipation, temporality, and stillness.
While it may resemble a barricade, the scaffold actually makes rupture accessible. It serves as a provisional bridge between states, facilitating passage through moments of transition and uncertainty. From its elevated platforms, the viewer encounters a shifted vantage point, uncovering what is normally obscured, both physically and perceptually. In this context, access is not merely spatial but relational, recalibrating one’s position within a system of care, labor, and attention.
Buen Calubayan extends this logic to the diagram. In the fabric of everyday life, the diagram operates as a cognitive scaffold, a temporary support through which we navigate, interpret, and reposition ourselves. Our daily rhythms, including commuting, working, ritual, and rest, compose a diagrammatic pulse. From this pulse emerges the infrastructure of maintenance that sustains collective life; maintenance is thus revealed not as an isolated act, but as a patterned, embodied practice embedded in time.
The exhibition interrogates the diagram’s function as a perceptual scaffold. By examining structures such as the view deck, the help desk, and the construction site, Calubayan reveals how these frameworks mediate our senses and link the individual to the wider social body. Through these sites, perception is shown to be a constructed and collectively sustained phenomenon.
The presentation unfolds through a multi-disciplinary array of paintings, drawings, diagrams, videos, and installations rooted in pedagogical practice. These works are conceived not as static objects but as operative structures, simultaneously the evidence and the building blocks of a process still "under construction." Each piece invites the viewer to inhabit the interval between suspension and completion. In ANDAMYO, maintenance is repositioned as a generative condition rather than passive preservation. Repair becomes the mechanism for revealing the labor that sustains life beneath the surface of visibility, establishing the scaffold as both a potent metaphor and a rigorous method.
