Artist Talk with Jarod Lew: Strange You Never Knew
Hear from artist Jarod Lew on his first solo exhibition, Strange You Never Knew, on view at UMMA from Feb 1—June 15, 2025. The exhibition features works from three of his recent photography series, as well as a newly created video installation. All of the works on display were inspired by Lew’s discovery that his mother was engaged to Vincent Chin, who was murdered by two autoworkers in Highland Park, Michigan in 1982. Chin’s death and the subsequent controversial court ruling galvanized the Asian American civil rights movement in Detroit and beyond.
Born in Metro Detroit, Michigan, Lew draws on photography to explore intergenerational encounters with diasporic loss, displacement, and postmemory. Through this exploration, his work contends with the performativity of race and its instability as a locus of meaning. Lew deftly employs numerous aesthetic strategies—such as lighting, portraiture, and constructed tableaus—to confront the complexities and incoherencies of race and racial belonging. Each image explores the tension between history and fantasy as a constructed moment of remembrance.
His practice not only represents an often-overlooked community within Metro Detroit, but also reimagines how he fits within the Asian American diaspora. In doing so, Lew creates a new kind of family album for himself and the Asian diaspora in the midwest.
Free and open to the public.
About Jarod Lew
Jarod Lew has been awarded the PDN Emerging Photographer award in 2016 and has been shortlisted for the Aperture Portfolio Prize in 2021. His photographs have been exhibited at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Detroit Institute of Arts, Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, Cantor Art Center at Stanford University, Blaffer Art Museum, the Center for Photography Woodstock, Design Museum of London, and Philharmonie de Paris. His works are held in public and private collections including the Bowdoin University Art Museum, Cantor Arts Center, Detroit Institute of Arts, Harvard Art Museum, Kadist, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the University of Michigan Museum of Art. Lew’s work has been written about in Aperture, Artforum, Elephant Magazine, and Hyperallergic. Lew holds an MFA in photography from the Yale School of Art.
SUPPORT
The 2025 Doris Sloan Memorial Program is presented in partnership with the Penny Stamps Speaker Series / University of Michigan Museum of Art. Established through the generosity of Dr. Herbert Sloan, this annual program honors one of the Museum’s most ardent friends and supporters, Doris Sloan.
Lead support for Jarod Lew: Strange You Never Knew is provided by the U-M Office of the Provost, Catherine Glynn Benkaim and Barbara Timmer, the UMMA Director’s Acquisition Committee, and the U-M Institute for the Humanities. Additional generous support is provided by U-M History of Art and Asian Languages and Cultures.