By Eleanor Oakes, May 10, 2025
"Your ruling seems to place so little weight on human life."——-Laura Chin, Executive Director, Organization of Chinese Americans, 1983
The day I became a mother, I also became my mother. I noticed it in glimpses at first, but with repetition came certainty: a phrase, a gesture, a sudden lilt in my tone. These momentary fragments collapsed time, placing me simultaneously in the role of mother and child, my-self becoming fluid. I didn’t realize how much of her I carried in me until the responsibility of parenting presented itself. And there, she emerged.
“Please Take Off Your Shoes” is one of four bodies of work in Detroit-born Jarod Lew’s first solo museum exhibition, “Strange You Never Knew,” at the University of Michigan Museum of Art (UMMA) through June 15. As these words greet me, I don’t read them so much as hear them, in a maternal voice that is gentle yet firm. A voice I never dared ignore as a child. A voice I now employ when I want my child to listen. And so, I obey. I take my shoes off, place them neatly out of the way, and as my socked feet alight on the wood floor, I become young again.
With the thoughtful curation of Jennifer Friess, UMMA’s Associate Curator of Photography, the four bodies of work presented in the exhibition feel like siblings with disparate features but similar mannerisms. “Please Take Off Your Shoes” presents domestic portraits scrutinizing second-generation Asian Americans in their parents’ homes. Studio lighting highlights these spaces as stages, their formality amplified by white frames. They are both intimate and theatrical, creating distance through displacement that holds even when Lew pushes in closer on a domestic detail. Present throughout is evidence of the quiet rituals that structure home: fresh flowers and plants, family photographs, pillows, stuffed animals, trinkets. Devoid of exterior context, these suburban tableaus become sanctuaries holding an amalgamation of generations, cultures, and expectations.
Across the large gallery space, “In Between You and Your Shadow” has a more lyrical tilt to its installation. Photomurals of past family photographs and Lew’s contemporary images serve as an underlayer for images of Lew’s own family. While this series centers around his mother, she is an elusive figure among the images: blurred by lens flare, obstructed by foreground objects, or appearing only as a hand reaching into the frame. The gallery text suggests this visual limitation frustrates the viewer’s desire to ‘know’ her, but I find her constant presence a comfort. She is always there, if often unseen. These images mirror the complexity of parent-child relationships. They dig at the limits of truly knowing a person, even one we carry with us in the deeply wound strands of our DNA, holding their lineage through blood memory.
Lew’s mother, Vickie, has adeptly dodged the camera from a young age. A central revelation of all the work on view invokes Lew’s discovery at the age of 25 that his mother was engaged to Vincent Chin, a Chinese American man brutally murdered by two white autoworkers in 1982 in Highland Park, Michigan. Chin was murdered the night of his bachelor party, just days before he was to marry Vickie. His murder was a galvanizing moment for Asian American civil rights, particularly as the two men who pleaded guilty to manslaughter were given the paltry sentence of a $3,000 fine and probation. It’s timely that the FBI quietly released the 602-page file on Chin’s murder just last year, filled with interviews, press clippings, and pleas for justice from Asian American groups across the country. Chin’s mother is frequently depicted in states of mourning across the articles, while Vickie committed herself to invisibility after the murder, a means of protecting herself and her future family.
In “The New Challengers Strike Back,” Lew places the viewer inside this legacy of racialized violence. On one 1990s-era television, archival footage loops of a 1982 event where participants smash a Japanese car in protest of lost U.S. auto jobs. The spectacle was framed then as a festive event, but the repeated thrashings of the yellow vehicle are a chilling parallel to the brutal beating of Vincent Chin’s body with the Louisville Slugger that would be his cause of death.This monitor sits against a contemporary image of a Chinese restaurant owned by Lew’s aunt. Her vulnerability is palpable as her back is turned to us while a television in the restaurant is frozen on the image of a leering police officer. This juxtaposition weaves historical trauma into our present moment, alluding to a complicated surveillance state. The glass case in the restaurant, both stoic and fragile, sits next to the physical monitor and its noises of bashing and shattering. On an opposing monitor, gallery visitors are invited to destroy a Toyota Celsior in a Super Street Fighter II bonus round. Whether we choose to participate or not, our complicity in this violence is suggested either through our action or inaction.
The center of the exhibition holds “Mimicry,” an installation of mid-century furnishings that feel like a time machine: an oak and glass coffee table, a woven couch, and a carousel projector that whirs and clicks with found slides from the 1950s-1970s. Lew inserts himself into many of the images, compositing his face over strangers whose pictures have been found in estate sales, online auctions, and some from UMMA’s permanent collection. Some of these images illuminate a provocative humor, but the camp of others creates a stark contrast to the otherwise moving voice throughout. Only one set of slides is left unedited, “Chinese Block Party 1954,” from an event hosted by a white family in a Detroit suburb; images that reveal the racist tropes of “Chinese-ness” pervading the historical record, which the exhibition so clearly refutes.
Aside from the retro technology and vintage furniture, too much of this exhibition feels poignantly of our current time. Sweeping bans on racial groups, deportations, trade wars – we still point fingers to cast blame at a generalized other. As an alternative gesture, I look to Vickie, with hands that aid, comfort, and hold. These are tender acts that counter spectacle. The care is both obvious and implied, the love inherent. Even in the long shadow of trauma, they speak of a devotion that is discreet, mundane, and relentless.
“Strange You Never Knew” is a testament to persistence. It celebrates the endurance of tending to each other through the banality of slicing fruit snacks, writing notes, or taking off our shoes. By tracing the fragile threads that intertwine private grief and public violence, Jarod Lew reveals the delicate tendons of community and the daily routines that resist erasure. He reminds us that legacy is not only what is left behind, but what we knowingly and unknowingly carry forward. These works honor the deep histories we hold in our bodies. They ask what is passed on when nothing is said, what persists. In doing so, they offer us a blueprint for remembrance, for resistance, and for love.
Eleanor Oakes is an artist and educator based in Detroit, where she is Associate Professor and Section Lead of Photography at the College for Creative Studies.
Installation image JAROD LEW "Strange You Never Knew" Courtesy of the University of Michigan Museum of Art.
JAROD LEW "Sister Friends' 2023. Courtesy of the University of Michigan Museum of Art.
JAROD LEW "The Millers 1952" 2024 Courtesy of the University of Michigan Museum of Art.
JAROD LEW "The New Challenges Strikes Back" 2024. Courtesy of the University of Michigan Museum of Art.
JAROD LEW "Untitled (Family Restaurant)" 2023. Courtesy of the University of Michigan Museum of Art.