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.