“Untitled” (Mother, Father, and Me), Jarod Lew
UMMA’s Strange You Never Knew is the first solo exhibition from Jarod Lew, a Detroit-based Chinese American photographer who grew up in Ferndale. As an adult, Lew discovered his mother had previously been engaged to Vincent Chin, a Chinese American autoworker. It was this engagement Chin was celebrating in 1982 when he was beaten to death with a baseball bat by two laid-off Chrysler workers outside of a strip club in Highland Park, a notorious hate crime that became a rallying cry for the Asian American civil rights movement. Chin’s killers were sentenced to a fine and probation but no jail time, the judge explaining that the white perpetrators “weren’t the kind of men you send to jail.”
Billed as “photographs of the Asian American diaspora in the Midwest,” Strange You Never Knew is an anthropological study as much as an artistic one. Much of the exhibit consists of Lew’s large-scale photos of Asian American Detroiters, both his own family (his mother is heavily featured) and others inside their homes. The tone is restrained, perhaps a bit uneasy. Children sit alongside their parents and elders, gazing outward, aware of the camera and each other, but there is a tension in their body language and facial expressions. It’s as if the subjects have things they want to say to each other, but can’t. The elders’ chosen environments have a specific feel: inlaid wooden furniture; flashes of gold and bright red; Buddha statues; potted bamboo plants; a pile of shoes next to a garage door. This decor is contrasted with the style of the younger generation: ironic t-shirts, Pokémon dolls, dyed hair.
In the center of the exhibit is Mimicry, a photo series in which Lew took old photos he found at the estate sale of a white family in Detroit and replaced their faces with his own. The series is presented as a carousel slideshow projected onto a screen in a comfortable recreation of a midcentury American living room. These images are occasionally interrupted by unedited photos showing the sort of casual racism Asian Americans have become used to, such as the white family taking part in a “Chinese-themed” party. The effect is comical, disconcerting, strange, highlighting how people of Asian descent have been left out of Detroit’s history.
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Humming in the background of all of this is the murder of Vincent Chin, a singularly terrifying event for the Asian diaspora nationwide, but especially in the Detroit area, where the rise of the Japanese automotive industry had been blamed for an economic downturn and rising racial resentment. The final piece of the exhibit is a fascinating, interactive audio-visual installation, titled The New Challengers Strike Back: On one side, a contemporary local newscast featuring a group of white Detroiters smashing a 1978 Toyota Corolla with a sledgehammer in front of a Chinese restaurant. Next to that, an interactive segment of the 1991 classic Super Nintendo game Street Fighter II, in which museum visitors are invited to destroy a car with karate on-screen. The foggy analog audio of the former and the tinny 16-bit music of the latter loop endlessly as you peruse the exhibit, a tense cacophony that suggests both the metaphorical impression the crime left on the Asian community, and a classic Japanese video game echoing through the dens of countless ’90s American households.
A complex marriage of history, identity, and physical space, Strange You Never Knew feels less like an exhibition of individual works and more like a single cohesive piece of art. It can be overwhelming, but that’s the point; if an artwork’s message were easy to convey, the artist would simply write it down. Visitors should give themselves time to dwell in, meditate on, and simply experience the atmosphere as it washes over them, situating them in a hyper-specific place, time, and culture.
Strange You Never Knew: A Solo Exhibition by Jarod Lew is at the U-M Museum of Art through June 15, 2025.