Founded by Kathleen “Kate” Lee and Clovis Lima Jr., 603 Arts Foundation is the first nonprofit dedicated exclusively to supporting emerging artists across Asia, the Asia-Pacific, and Latin America through exhibitions, institutional partnerships, collecting, public programming, and long-term artist advocacy.
Based in New York City, the foundation was established in response to the growing contradiction that while technology has made art more visible than ever, meaningful cultural exchange has become increasingly rare and fragmented, with many artists from Asian and Latin America continuing to face barriers to institutional recognition and collector networks. This prompted them to manually build the ecosystem they felt was missing themselves.
“The internet and social media have made art more visible, but not necessarily more accessible,” says Lee. “We realized that genuine cultural exchange still depends on intimacy, context, conversation, and sustained support.”
Named after the 0.0603 seconds it takes light to travel between Salvador, Brazil and Manila, Philippines, Lima Jr. and Lee’s birthplaces, respectively, 603 reflects the foundation’s larger mission of collapsing distance between cultures through art.
This summer, 603 Arts Foundation presents its inaugural exhibition, The cataclysm of binary star systems, at Nunu Fine Art in SoHo, on view until 29 August. Inspired by celestial mythology and the prospect of rebuilding civilization, the exhibition explores themes of migration, memory, identity, and collective survival, asking what histories and cultural traditions humanity would choose to carry into an uncertain future.
Exhibiting artists include María Elena Pombo, featured in MoMA PS1’s Greater New York 2026; Ang Ziqi Zhang, whose paintings merge abstraction, nightlife, and late-capitalist visual culture; Rithika Merchant, celebrated for intricate cosmological narratives drawing from folklore and science; Keb Cerda, Jess Vieira, and Fiona von Fürstenberg who exhibits in the United States for the first time; and Alex Maceda, Ana Won, César López, Danni Huang, John José Santos III, Leah Ying Lin, and Lena Becerra.
