LIFE BEYOND FIRST CLASS
ARTS & COLLECTIBLES
BREATH
BENEATH SURFACE
With Aqueous Renaissance, Christy Lee Rogers offers a masterful retrospective that transforms photography into an immersive, painterly experience of rebirth, revealing water as both her muse and her medium of transcendence.
From Left to Right: The Universe Moves in Mysterious Ways; Sea of Tranquility; Venus Rising.
Few artists today possess the audacity to treat water not merely as a backdrop, but as a co-creator. Christy Lee Rogers, with her unforgettable retrospective Aqueous Renaissance at ART LABOR Gallery in Shanghai, delivers an exhilarating reminder that photography can still astonish. These are not images designed to impress. They are designed to move, to engulf, to suspend.
Over the past two decades, Rogers has carved out an entirely original visual language—one born of darkness, of motion, and of liquid light. Her subjects float mid-frame like sacred apparitions. They twist, reach, and fall with a grace that defies gravity, wrapped in waves of silk and shadow. Shot entirely underwater at night, these photographs do not mimic painting. They reclaim it. Echoes of Caravaggio, Rubens, and Titian swirl through each composition, but the works are undeniably her own—cinematic, spiritual, and devastatingly present.
Aqueous Renaissance could not have arrived at a more poignant time. In an era saturated with digital clarity and visual overload, Rogers gives us texture, breath, and stillness. Her waterborne worlds are fragile yet immense, timeless yet urgently modern. There is drama here, yes—but not of spectacle. Rather, it is the drama of surrender, of movement stripped of ego. Her camera becomes a witness to vulnerability.
Born in Hawaii, raised between cultures, Rogers is perfectly poised to offer a global vision rooted in nuance. Her presence in Shanghai is especially resonant. This is a city built on water, ever evolving, always in conversation with the old and the new. ART LABOR Gallery, long a champion of cross-cultural dialogue, offers the perfect stage for this exhibition. Here, Rogers’ art becomes more than an aesthetic experience, it becomes a gesture of connection across geographic and ideological divides.
At a time when US China relations remain fraught, Rogers does what governments and institutions cannot. She offers beauty without boundary. Raised in the center of the Pacific, her work carries the clarity and hospitality of island light. The result is a body of art that feels less like photography and more like myth. One thinks of Renaissance altarpieces, of religious frescoes, of dreams remembered in the moment just before waking.
Clockwise from Top Left: Moonlight Serenade; Primavera; Dreaming; Not of this Earth.
Commissioned by James Cameron for Avatar: The Way of Water, featured in global Apple campaigns, and celebrated with the Sony World Photography Award, Rogers has earned her place among the visual greats of her generation. But this retrospective shows us something deeper. Here is an artist fully at home in her vision, returning repeatedly to the same source—water—to ask new questions about what it means to see, to feel, and to belong.
“For me, water has always been both chaos and freedom,” Rogers says. The phrase lingers long after the exhibition ends. What she gives us in Aqueous Renaissance is not escape, but confrontation by way of beauty. Her subjects are not drowning. They are becoming. And for those of us who step into her world, even briefly, the experience is nothing short of redemptive.
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