Tommy Lei (b. 1988, Hong Kong) is an Asian American, lens-based visual artist based in Los Angeles. His practice moves across three modes — photography, documentary, and audiovisual installation — tracing the tensions between stillness and presence, diasporic memory and belonging, the overlooked and the enduring.

His ongoing series Remnants, begun in 2017, turns toward what the city has set aside, finding in overlooked objects and thresholds a way of seeing differently. Synchronicities renders the familiar through a custom infrared process, revealing an altered state that is always present yet invisible to the naked eye. Human. Nature., a collaborative audiovisual work with composer Braden Pontoli, unfolds into duration, exploring rebirth through motion and sound. And Dreams (formerly Infrared Dreams), nominated for an Aesthetica Art Prize in 2024, reimagines natural landscapes in spectral color, floating between document and dream.

Informed by Buddhist contemplative philosophy and the Taoist principle of wu wei, Lei's work turns toward the liminal — the threshold between visibility and disappearance, between what a place remembers and what it lets go. His photographs attend to the dignity of what persists: the residue of public space, the quiet insistence of the natural world, the moments that wait for someone to notice them. The result is a form of contemplative photography — slower, quieter, and willing to let meaning remain unresolved.

His public art and installation work has been commissioned by JPMorgan Chase, the Los Angeles County Department of Arts and Culture, and the City of Seattle. His photographs are held in private collections in the United States, France, South Korea, and the United Kingdom. A Canson Infinity ambassador, he has been featured in Architectural Digest, The Hollywood Reporter, Fotografiska, and Aesthetica.