Tommy Lei - Synchronicities
We pass through the world largely unaware of what we leave behind — a discarded arm chair resting beneath a tree, a vehicle forgotten on a quiet street, a driveway that no longer leads anywhere. Synchronicities is a series of infrared photographs that ask: what if these moments are not random at all?
Working in infrared, I render the overlooked in a spectrum invisible to the naked eye — transforming the familiar and forgotten into dreamlike compositions of pinks and reds. The choice of medium is deliberate: infrared does not stylize its subjects, it reveals them. It surfaces an altered state that was always present, in things we had already decided not to see.
The series takes its name from the philosophical concept of synchronicity — events that are random, non-correlated, yet feel profoundly connected. To move through this work is to experience that tension: the sense that we are deeply detached from our surroundings and, at the same time, woven into every corner of them.
Tommy Lei (b. 1988) is a Los Angeles–based visual artist whose practice is concerned with stillness, diasporic memory, and the perceptual conditions of liminal space. Working across photography, installation, and audiovisual experience, his images trace the tensions between displacement and arrival — finding belonging in overlooked places and dignity in what the world tends to discard.
Born to immigrant parents, Lei’s work is informed by Buddhist contemplative philosophy, the Taoist principle of wu wei, and a formation in the social sciences at Cornell University. Recent commissions include Dive for JPMorgan Chase and Canopies for the Los Angeles County Department of Arts and Culture.
His work engages broader conversations around slowness, perception, and the role of sustained attention in an overstimulated visual culture — proposing quietude as both aesthetic position and working methodology. His photographs are held in private collections in the United States, France, South Korea, and the United Kingdom, and have been exhibited at Bit Basel, Miami Art Week (2025), the Pasadena Museum of History (2025), and the 19th Horizons Zingst Photo Festival, Germany (2026), among other venues.