CHLOÉ LEE

Hoisan Dream is a poetic essay film that explores the artist's connection with her late grandmother, who returns in dreams years after her passing to reveal a family secret. Following these dreams, Lee traveled to Hoisan, China—a village in the south known as the origin of many early Chinese immigrants to the West—for the first time. The film weaves together footage from this trip with photographs from her grandmother's first and only return to Hoisan after immigrating to Canada decades prior. It meditates on the generational bond between women, the sacredness of ancestral land, and the tension between family history and the inevitable erasure brought by time and development. While Lee later investigates the disappearance of places in work such as Reflections of Little Red Dot, here she explores places which are abandoned—spaces devoid of the people who would help her connect the dots of her place in her family's history and the ones she holds dear. This piece marks an early articulation of themes central to Lee's practice: personal agency, the interplay of permanence and impermanence, and the shifting landscapes of memory across generations.

Created during pandemic lockdown, this work uses 3D space & custom soundscapes to investigate the relationship between memory, internal experience & environmental presence — early inquiries that inform later immersive environments like Temporal World.

Presented here as an excerpt, Memory Keeper is an experimental video composed of personal footage filmed by the artist—moments from her life and recordings of herself within her environments—which she digitally embeds into her own body. The work follows the journey of a single memory as it is brought into existence, held within the somatic form, and eventually drifts through an imaginary space. This piece represents a critical juncture in the artist's practice, moving away from linear narrative towards the spatial exploration of embodied memory. It serves as a conceptual bridge to her later extended reality works, experimenting with how memory can be experienced as both an internal sensation and an externalized environment.

City Brevities is a series of photographs that explores the ephemeral presence of the collective in urban environments. By layering conté drawings atop these images of busily transited places, Lee sought to highlight a few individuals amongst the many "ghosts" that inhabit and move through these shared spaces. These works serve as early sketches for her ongoing interest in how we leave invisible marks on our surroundings—a theme that continues to evolve in her current extended reality works, such as Reflections of Little Red Dot.

An early scripted film work exploring interiority, externalization & how imagination manifests as perceptual experience.

This early exploration in immersive experience design invites viewers into the stories of sixteen people who strongly identify with two different names, exploring the power of names and the ways in which one's sense of self can be shaped, reshaped, and refined over time. The looping three-monitor installation includes custom-casted bodies around a table with synchronous multi-camera video interviews, where viewers hear how chosen names and nicknames reflect alter egos, deep desires, and attempts to leave behind a traumatic past. This reimagining of the dialogue between the interviewer and interviewee materializes each individual’s different personas into separate sculptural bodies.