FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Fogo Island, Newfoundland, June 2, 2026 — Fogo Island Arts and The Shen Foundation announced today a new collaborative residency program supporting artists from across the Asian diaspora to live and work on Fogo Island, Newfoundland and Labrador.
The first recipient of The Shen Foundation Residency is Covey Gong (b. 1994, Hunan, China, lives and works in New York, USA), who will spend two months on the island in June and July 2026. The artist will work from the Long Studio, designed by Todd Saunders, the same architect behind Fogo Island Inn. The residency covers travel and housing, which includes living in a traditional saltbox home, and provides artists with uninterrupted time and space on an island off an island off the North Atlantic. Gong presented a solo exhibition at the Sculpture Center in New York in 2024, and he is currently participating in Greater New York 2026, organized by MoMA PS1.
Commenting on the artist’s work, Kitty Scott, Director, Fogo Island Arts said: “Covey Gong’s recent sculptures pull from an extraordinary span of human time, reaching from Egyptian deities dating to around 3300 BCE, as seen at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibition Divine Egypt, all the way to Jia Zhangke’s celebrated film The World. His work fuses handmade craft with industrial processes, and the tension between those two sensibilities is very much alive in the objects he makes. Learning directly from Gong about his current thinking, while he is on Fogo Island, promises to be an engaging conversation about the artist’s approach to making in this time.”
Building on an existing relationship
Eleanor Shen, founder of The Shen Foundation, added: “Over the years of being involved with Fogo Island Arts, I have observed the ways it invites exceptional artists to a distinct place that allows for expansive thinking. This partnership is a natural extension of our mutually shared belief that artists thrive in the right conditions. The Shen Foundation is thrilled to support this residency for artistic discovery on Fogo Island.”
This new residency represents a continuation of a creative relationship that began with an earlier collaboration that brought Filipino-Hong Kong artist Wong Winsome Dumalagan to Fogo Island in 2024. It was made possible with the support of Eleanor Shen and developed in partnership with Para Site and MOCA Toronto, establishing an unprecedented connection between Fogo Island and Hong Kong. During her initial residency, Winsome discovered a Filipino diasporic community working in the local fish processing plant, a finding that has since drawn her back to the island a second time and will inform components of her upcoming solo exhibition, The Drifts, the Lingerings, set to open in Hong Kong this fall.
The Shen Foundation Residency is shaped by these existing relationships and learnings. The partnership creates conditions that cannot be replicated elsewhere, enabling an artist to come and connect with a geographically and culturally distinct place where unexpected histories and stories are reflected back to those who spend time within it. A residency of this kind supports a special bilateral exchange that both brings the world to Fogo Island while carrying Fogo Island’s perspective outwards across global contemporary discourse about art and ideas.
ABOUT THE SHEN FOUNDATION
The Shen Foundation champions Asian diasporic artists as important makers in our time, cultivating a generative environment where bold ideas, experimental practices, and challenging projects take form and circulate widely. It forges enduring relationships with artists grounded in trust, rigor, and curiosity, creating conditions in which new artistic languages, risks, and contradictions are supported and understood.
ABOUT FOGO ISLAND ARTS
Fogo Island Arts is a residency-based contemporary art venue situated on Fogo Island, Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada. Founded in 2008 by Shorefast, a registered Canadian charity, Fogo Island Arts has brought artists, curators, filmmakers, writers, and thinkers from around the world to Fogo Island to live, research, and make new work. Combining contemporary art, iconic architecture, and community engagement in a singular setting, Fogo Island Arts is rooted in the belief that artists and thinkers are visionaries with a unique capacity to reveal and respond to the complexities of our time.
Visit fogoislandarts.ca
ABOUT SHOREFAST
Shorefast is a Canadian registered charity (#85883 0904 RR0001) forging new pathways at the intersection of economic development, business, art and philanthropy. Its initiatives include the Fogo Island Inn, Fogo Island Arts, the Shorefast Institute for Place-Based Economies and programs focused on food systems, the environment, culture and heritage. Through work on Fogo Island and beyond, Shorefast builds, learns and shares economic development practices that activate the intrinsic assets of communities, towards a vision of more prosperous economies that serve people, nature and culture in more places.
Visit shorefast.org
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