We Are All Ghosts - 2025 documentary, running time 35mins 15 sec

Spanning 45 years, the life of the Lee family is told through home videos that reflect themes of memory formation, roles and relationships, and how migration and connections are developed within these cycles.

artist statement:

30 minutes of home videos are sequentially edited and examined, in Bo Lee’s personal narrative documentary We Are All Ghosts. The work spans 45 years of footage, with a title card placed before the start of each decade. The information on the title cards provide us with the (1)years the footage took place, (2)equipment used to shoot the footage, and its (3)location.

The dialogue is subtitled using familial designations rather than names. (4) For instance, the title “son” is used to refer to the artist in the 80s and also used to refer to the artist’s son in the 2000s. Similary with the titles father and mother. How do roles configure and reconfigure our lives?

Throughout the 45 years, there are connections we can make, regarding places visited and the path of migration. (3) Memory regardless of time, is embedded into physical places and the routes that we navigate. Often time, these memories are handed down to the next generation in the form of routine or tradition.

(2) The equipment or the technology to preserve the memory becomes an important factor in regards to recollection. Analog has certain textures and degradation that affects how we remember certain scenes while clean digital, or in this case, the iphone footage almost seems to flatten a stretch of time periods into one memory. We can often associate the (1) period the footage was taken by examining the medium used to record the footage. Up until a certain point, when the footage becomes “too clean” and texture-less.

The project started as an ontological investigation, towards the truth of existence, seeing 45 years of life play out within a single timeline. But after completion, it has become an epistemological exploration, on how memory is preserved and accessed.