Jarod Lew: Strange You Never Knew
Photographs of the Asian American Diaspora in the Midwest
In his first solo museum exhibition, Metro Detroit-born Chinese American photographer Jarod Lew explores themes of identity, memory, and community through photography. Strange You Never Knew features three of Lew’s recent photography series and one new multimedia commission, all of which delve into personal and historical narratives of the Asian American diaspora in the Midwest.
The stories told in Strange You Never Knew are rooted in a deeply personal discovery. As a young adult, Lew learned that his mother was engaged to Vincent Chin, whose racially motivated murder in 1982 by two auto workers in Highland, Michigan, galvanized the Asian American civil rights movement. The profound impact of Chin’s death and the subsequent court ruling—wherein his murderers received no jail time—continues to resonate through the works on display, connecting personal experience with broader historical and social contexts.
By juxtaposing contemporary portrait photographs of Asian Americans with archival snapshots, news footage, and videogame sequences, Lew draws connections between the past and present, examining how identity is shaped by both individual and collective memory. In doing so, Strange You Never Knew brings visibility to the often-overlooked histories of Asian Americans in the Midwest, while challenging viewers to reflect on the ongoing impact of racial discrimination and cultural stereotyping.
Related Events
Select Works on View
Please Take Off Your Shoes
Please Take Off Your Shoes, Lew’s ongoing series, makes visible a multi-generational community through still lifes and portraits staged in suburban southeast Michigan.
In Between You and Your Shadow
In Between You and Your Shadow features intimate views of Lew’s own family and, in particular, his mother, whose aversion to being photographed results in obfuscations and layered imagery.
Mimicry
The images in Mimicry features Lew’s own face, digitally montaged onto photographs found at a white suburban Detroit family’s estate sale. Notably, Lew leaves those photographs portraying the family hosting a “Chinese”-themed party poignantly unaltered.
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 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.