Yuri Pattison’s entropy study series includes mass-produced models of unrealized housing developments destined for the sales offices of major real estate projects throughout China. As the ongoing crisis spread through the Chinese property sector in the wake of Evergrande Group’s default in 2021, many of these developments remain unrealized and the contents of numerous corporate sales offices began appearing on secondhand marketplaces such as Xianyu. These artifacts of the crisis connect property development, real estate speculation, and high-risk wealth management products sold by Evergrande and other developers to cover funding gaps, underscoring the links between material and virtual financial mechanisms.

The entropy study series is presented against the backdrop of Pattison’s cloud gazing (americium) (2025), a real-time animation of an open sky interspersed with shifting cloud formations. The intermittent activation of lights within the scale models and atmospheric variations in the animation are each based on the output of an improvised Quantum Random Number Generator (QRNG) designed by Lukas Koch and built by Thad Insoll that translates the radioactive decay of the synthetic element Americium-241 into numerical data. Random number generators are crucial in financial simulations used to model uncertain future events, estimate potential outcomes and manage risk. While standard computers rely on pseudo-random numbers, the organic entropy of QRNGs produces genuine randomness, offering a higher degree of unpredictability and thus reliability in complex financial instruments. Abstracting this entropy into the animated cloudscape, cloud gazing (americium) creates a self-contained system for nephelomancy—the ancient practice of divination through interpreting cloud formations—linking the scientific veneer of financial speculation and climate modeling with the longstanding human desire to predict the future.

Presented in Far East Shopping Centre (FESC), a strata-titled mall in Singapore’s high-end Orchard Road retail district, Pattison’s work is directly adjacent to the unit housing the building’s management, “The Management Corporation Strata Title Plan No. 397.” FESC exemplifies a familiar trend among Singapore’s strata-title malls: since 2023, the building has attempted to generate owner consensus and Urban Redevelopment Authority approval for a collective sale of the property. The same ownership model responsible for these shopping centres’ distinct character is now a major factor in their decline. Since a majority of the strata-title owners must agree to invest in the maintenance and upgrading of facilities, strata-title owners often opt instead for a collective en bloc sale to a single outside developer—whether a large development corporation or a real-estate investment trust—who may then decide to overhaul the property or, more likely, to demolish the structure in favour of new construction.

Text by Duncan Bass, Singapore Art Museum. 2025