Jarod Lew – ‘Please Take Off Your Shoes’ – Series

Artist Biography

Jarod Lew is a Chinese American artist and photographer from Metro Detroit, Michigan. His work explores themes of identity, community and displacement. Lew has been awarded the PDN Emerging Photographer award and has been shortlisted for the Aperture Portfolio Prize. His photographs have been exhibited at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Detroit Institute of Arts, Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, the Center for Photography Woodstock, Design Museum of London, and Philharmonie de Paris. His clients include New Yorker, New York Times, Financial Times Weekend, GQ and NPR.

Description

Lew’s recent series, Please Take off Your Shoes, features portraits and still lives set within suburban Southeast Michigan homes. The series was inspired by the discovery that the artist’s mother was the fiancé of Vincent Chin who was murdered by two autoworkers in Highland Park, Michigan in 1982. Chin’s death and the subsequent controversial court ruling in which his murderers received only probation and a fine, but no jail time, galvanized the Asian American civil rights movement in Detroit and beyond.

Please Take Off Your Shoes represents Lew’s efforts to reconcile his family’s history with his own experience as a first generation Asian American. Below, he describes the inspiration for the series and the significance of Metro Detroit as a setting for his images:

“My mom was engaged to another man before she married my dad. His name was Vincent Chin, whose murder instigated the Asian American civil rights movement in 1982. Please Take off Your Shoes takes place in the setting of his life and murder, my hometown of metro-Detroit, as I face what he left behind. In response to Detroit’s disintegrating infrastructure, various Asian diasporas have scattered into the suburbs. What survives are the traces of a lost community within the suburban interior. Asian Americans face structural forms of isolation as a result of racist and economic forces that break up their communities. Examining this loneliness in private rooms, my photos express a shared sense of precarity. The images signal racial-ethnic expressions of a marginal identity that rests on a paradoxical sense of belonging and alienation, visibility and invisibility. Positioning the particular in relation to the collective, the photographs foster a sense of connection across sites of separation.”  Jarod Lew, “Statement,” Maake Magazine

Lew deftly employs numerous aesthetic strategies—including those from both documentary and portraiture practices—when making his staged still lifes and portraits. He steadfastly confronts the construction of volatile Asian Americans stereotypes, such as the model minority myth, by making images that picture the diversity within his community. Through his practice, Lew 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.