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How Kate Lee and Clovis Lima Jr. Are Connecting the Creative Cultures of Asia and Latin America

With the launch of 603 Arts Foundation, the collectors have transformed a shared collection rooted in their Filipino and Brazilian backgrounds into a platform for artists whose work remains underrepresented in New York.

The new generation of art collectors wants to go beyond the ownership of artwork to have a deeper impact on artists’ careers while feeling like they are part of a story and helping to foster a community built around creative exchange and shared passions. It’s an approach that transcends acquisition to embrace an ecosystem of values, meanings and human relationships that they believe collecting should encompass. Kate Lee and Clovis Lima Jr., founders of the new 603 Arts Foundation, belong to this group. Lee is originally from the Philippines and Lima Jr. is from Brazil, two countries that, despite their distance, share much as a result of parallel and, at times, intersecting colonial histories, but also centuries of global exchange through the galleons, which led to a blending of traditions spanning cuisine, craftsmanship, culture and spirituality. Art from both countries, despite their extremely vibrant and long-established markets, has only recently begun gaining broader international attention. Amplifying these connected voices while celebrating the cultural roots that continue to inspire them is at the core of 603 Arts Foundation’s mission and the vision that guides Lee and Lima Jr.’s collecting.

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Latin America and Asia are among the fastest-growing regions in the global art market, but artists from these regions remain significantly underrepresented, making up just 3 percent and 9 percent of the art displayed in major U.S. museums, respectively—a persistent gap between market growth and institutional visibility. 603 Arts Foundation is the first nonprofit dedicated to supporting emerging artists across Asia and Latin America with exhibition support, institutional partnerships, collecting, public programming and, eventually, residency and visa support. On August 8, it opened its inaugural exhibition, “The Cataclysm of Binary Star Systems,” hosted by Nunu Fine Art in New York with work by artists from nine countries, several of whom are exhibiting in the U.S. for the first time.

Born in the Philippines, Lee moved to New Zealand with her family as a child, as her parents sought new professional opportunities. When she was 13, they moved again so her mother could accept a position at the University of Chicago. Lee completed high school, college and graduate school in Chicago, initially studying immunology, on track to become a doctor. Notably, she did not grow up in a family of collectors. (Even now, her mother sometimes asks why she is buying art instead of a house or a car.)  “We did not have inherited wealth with which to buy art,” she tells Observer, yet her family valued museum visits, and Chicago offered plenty of opportunities to engage with art.

Before the pandemic, Lee researched HIV vaccines, dengue and other tropical diseases. She later moved to New York to work at a genetic-testing startup, where she served as a bridge between engineers and scientific teams. That role led to approximately 11 years working in technology across several industries, including in product strategy and messaging at Meta until a large round of layoffs in 2026. By then, she had already become disillusioned with the company’s intensifying emphasis on A.I. metrics and employee monitoring and had decided not to sacrifice her health to the job after experiencing burnout. She was looking for more purpose, for something more meaningful: “After years in technology, I felt I was seeing the same people over and over and wanted to do something else.”

That was when art entered Lee’s life through a friend, Anne Parke, an art adviser who was organizing gallery walks and other events. A restaurant presentation where a gallery brought artworks into an informal social setting “was the moment when I realized I could enter a gallery and that acquiring art was not completely beyond me,” she admits.

Her first purchase was a work by Chicago artist Neal Vandenbergh, whose science-fiction imagery appealed to her longstanding interest in futuristic, mystical and technological themes.........

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