Strange You Never Knew
Photographs of the Asian American Diaspora in the Midwest
In his first solo museum exhibition, Chinese American multimedia artist Jarod Lew explores the limits and potential of knowing—knowing who you are, knowing your family history, and knowing your place in a community.
Strange You Never Knew features Lew’s efforts to explore how the medium of photography can function as a repository of personal and communal histories. He composes portraits of his family and friends as a way to know those closest to him and to forge relationships within his community. Lew also manipulates existing media, such as found photographs, news footage, and video game sequences, in order to surface relationships among historic and contemporary acts of racism and violence toward Asian Americans.
Strange You Never Knew brings visibility to the often-overlooked histories of Asian Americans, while challenging viewers to reflect on the ongoing impact of racial discrimination and cultural stereotyping. By weaving together connections between personal histories and broader social contexts, Lew draws connections between the past and present, examining how identity is shaped by both individual and collective memory.
Related Events
Select Works on View
Please Take Off Your Shoes
Please Take Off Your Shoes features portraits of second-generation Asian Americans in their parents’ homes and centers the intergenerational complexities of Asian American identities within the diaspora.
In Between You and Your Shadow
This series invites audiences into a deeply personal part of Lew’s family history by sharing his discovery that his mother was once the fiancée of Vincent Chin, whose racially motivated murder in Highland Park, Michigan in 1982 sparked an Asian American civil rights movement. Lew’s mother is the reluctant primary subject of many of the photographs, always represented turned away from the camera, obscured by light or objects in her home, or cropped by the camera frame.
Mimicry
The images in Mimicry feature Lew’s own face, digitally montaged onto photographs the artist found at estate sales, online auctions, and UMMA’s permanent collection. The performance and instability of race is made tangible in these images, as is the lack of Asian and Asian American representation in the white-dominated American visual record.
The New Challengers Strike Back
Lew responds to the longstanding history of discrimination against Asians and Asian Americans in the Midwest in a newly commissioned multimedia installation, which juxtaposes two monitors: one that displays 1980s news footage of a racially motivated Japanese-car bashing and a second that features a playable version of a bonus level from the 1990s video game Super Street Fighter II. Through this pairing, Lew explores the connection between Detroit’s historical economic struggles and cultural conflicts.
About Jarod Lew
Jarod Lew is an artist who employs photography to explore intergenerational encounters with diasporic loss, displacement, and post memory. Through this exploration, his work engages with the performativity of race and its inherent instability as a locus of meaning.
His project Please Take Off Your Shoes was shortlisted for the Aperture Portfolio Prize in 2021 and featured in the 2023 group exhibition Kinship: Photography and Connection at SFMOMA. Lew’s works are included in public and private collections such as the Cantor Arts Center, Detroit Institute of Arts, Kadist, Harvard Art Museums, University of Michigan Museum of Art, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. His work has been covered by Aperture, Artforum, Elephant Magazine, and Aesthetica Magazine. Lew holds an MFA in photography from the Yale School of Art.
SUPPORT
Lead support for this exhibition is provided by Catherine Glynn Benkaim and Barbara Timmer, the UMMA Director’s Acquisition Committee, and the U-M Office of the Provost, Institute for the Humanities, and Ross School of Business. Additional generous support is provided by U-M History of Art, the Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese Studies, Asian Languages and Cultures, American Culture, and the Asian/Pacific Islander American Studies Program.
