Visual artist Joyce Yu-Jean Lee transforms Fulton Center into an oceanic cathedral with a 52-channel video installation “Manahatta Waterways: A Sanctuary” that symbolically guides viewers down from the street level on a descent through ecological and geological time. Featuring whales, corals, fish, light, and moving water, the work draws upon marine science and ornamental traditions. Lee envisions Manahatta—the Lenape name for Manhattan—as both a contemporary harbor and a timeless reef, shaped by planetary cycles of climate and evolution.

At street level, large-scale screens feature humpback whales whose resurgence in New York Harbor followed the Clean Water Act. Seen lunge-feeding on Menhaden fish and exhaling through their blowholes, their movements form patterns echoing Chinese porcelain and Delftware—a nod to colonial histories and the cycle of reverence and exploitation.

Lower-level screens shift to reef-scale life, with footage filmed by the artist at the Long Island Aquarium in one of the largest all-living, closed-system coral reefs in the Western Hemisphere. Stony and soft corals, anemones, and colorful fish—tangs, wrasses, gobies, and angelfish—yield vibrant kaleidoscopic designs like stained glass windows.

In the subway mezzanine, an animated triptych immerses viewers in the ocean’s Mesophotic “twilight zone,” filmed at a depth of 289 feet. Blue and golden animations showcase Gorgonian sea fans, brittle stars, glassfish and anthias fish, feather duster worms, and the rare ornate ghost pipefish.

Together, these four chapters link daily transit with ecological recovery and discovery, inviting commuters to imagine a marine continuum where the city is inseparable from water—an architecture held, shaped, and ultimately reclaimed by the ocean.

The artist thanks the following contributors for access, footage, and guidance:

Gotham Whale: underwater footage by Celia Ackerman and above water footage by Christopher St. Lawrence

Drone footage by Joanna Steidle

Filming permission by Joe Yaiullo, Curator/Co-Founder of the Long Island Aquarium

Underwater research footage courtesy of Dr. Sonia J. Rowley

Code based effects and video editing by Isaac Kim

Joyce Yu-Jean Lee is a Taiwanese American visual artist based in New York City who works with digital media and kiln-formed glass. Her artwork examines how mass media, technology and culture shape notions of truth and understanding of the “other.” She has exhibited internationally and domestically, including The Delaware Contemporary and Kreeger Museums, Hong Kong Center for Community Cultural Development - Green Wave Art and the Austrian Association of Women Artists (VBKÖ). Her art project about Internet censorship, “FIREWALL Cafe” was covered in The Washington Post, Hong Kong Free Press, Huffington Post, Hyperallergic and on BBC Radio. Lee received her B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania and her M.F.A. from Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA). She is currently an Assistant Professor at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and the 2026-27 Highsmith Distinguished Scholar at UNC Asheville.