When Tianying Lei’s visa expired, she had to leave the United States. A reused soda bottle, collected cat whiskers, handmade ceramics, a clay prototype and empty medication bottles remained behind. That account, published by arts platform Zealous, supplies the starting point for Entropy of Belonging, the browser artwork Lei made with Constance Lu.[1]
These are small possessions to carry the weight of a departure. Their ordinariness gives the work its scale: a life can be recognisable in things that would look unremarkable in somebody else’s room.
The objects appear as 3D scans rendered into particles. Lumen’s description explains the interaction: a hand gesture temporarily draws an object together, while continued effort holds off its dispersal. Keeping the shape intact becomes something the visitor has to do.[1][2]
An archive with an unwritten future
The journals Lei kept provide the work’s lived record. Beside that archive, a generative system produces diary entries dated to the current day. It imagines ordinary routines and encounters in the city she left. The entries accumulate, giving an interrupted life a succession of days that their supposed author never experienced there.[2]
Zealous reports that visitors encounter diary fragments and generated continuations without knowing which are authentic. Lei’s voice and handwriting also run through the piece. Those personal traces make the uncertainty specific: a familiar manner of expression can accompany an event that did not happen.[1]
Reading the work this way, the unsettled question is who gets to continue a first-person account. The date on a generated entry promises the ordinary authority of a diary: someone was here, today, and noticed this. In this artwork, that promise has been deliberately made unstable.
Holding on takes an action
Entropy of Belonging was named a 2026 Lumen Prize Legacy Future Award finalist. Its browser form brings the journal, particle objects and continuing fiction into one work, rather than leaving the AI text as a separate demonstration.[2]
The two interactions ask different things of a visitor. An object requires attention to remain assembled; another diary entry can appear through the system’s continued generation. Together they make an absence perceptible through actions and reading. A recovered shape can resemble a possession closely, and a new sentence can sound plausible, while the person’s interrupted relationship with the place remains unresolved.[2]
Sources & further reading
- What’s on Artists’ Minds Right Now? The Artist Prize National Panel Reveal All Carmela Vienna, Zealous · 14 Oct 2026 · Accessed 19 Oct 2026
- Entropy of Belonging The Lumen Prize · 23 Jul 2026 · Accessed 19 Oct 2026