Covey Gong
About the Artist
Covey Gong was born in Hunan, China and lives and works in New York. Gong’s sculpture and installations are driven by an inquiry into the politics of aesthetics. They investigate how narratives are mediated through structures of display, revealing tensions between past and present, fiction and reality. Gong explores spectacle as both a site of control and a space for subversion, foregrounding the hybrid nature of cultural production in which motifs and narratives are repurposed and transformed. These questions are particularly urgent in an era shaped by digital media and the accelerated circulation of images. By juxtaposing seemingly unrelated forms and images, Gong excavates hidden historical and theoretical relationships between different periods and places, revealing how the spectacle of exoticism has been incorporated into the machinery of the present.
Across recent projects, including The World (2025), After the World (2025) and In Practice (2024), Gong rearticulates architectural replicas and Orientalist narratives into stark metal structures, subjecting cultural symbols to repeated translation and drift. 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.
