Jarod Lew

Jarod Lew is a Chinese American artist and photographer from 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.

Lew’s talk focuses on his first solo exhibition, Strange You Never Knew, on view at the University of Michigan Museum Art from February 1 – June 15, 2025. This exhibition includes works from three of his photography series, Please Take Off Your Shoes, In Between You and Your Shadow, and Mimicry, as well as a newly created video installation. All of these works were inspired by the discovery that the artist’s mother was the fiancée of 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. 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. 

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.

Presented in partnership with University of Michigan Museum of Art. This project was made possible by a grant from the Arts Initiative at the University of Michigan.

Series presenting partners: Detroit PBS, ALL ARTS, and PBS Books. Media partner: Michigan Public.