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Jarod Lew
The Most American Thing (Tina), 2021
Archival pigment print, 32 x 39 inches
Edition 1/5 + 2AP, signed, on mount
Unframed
Courtesy of the artist
Estimated value: $3,500
In 2012, I found out that my mom was engaged to another man before she married my dad. His name was Vincent Chin, the subject of a hate crime that 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 across the suburbs. What survives are the artifacts, signifiers, and gestures of a shared racial-cultural identity within the American suburban interior. This clash between “Asian” and “American” aesthetics lay bare the unresolved tensions of an unfinished history.
The objects and spaces that signal racial-ethnic forms of survival and erasure can produce a paradoxical sense of belonging and alienation for younger generations of Asian Americans. As a consequence of displacement and the pressures of assimilation, their identities do not always cohere as authentic and aligned with their cultural origins. The photographs help explore the complex effects of surviving displacement, which stands in contrast to the hypervisibility of racial violence that Vincent Chin endured.
"Please Take Off Your Shoes" captures the particularities of its subjects and the rooms of their lives to express how the sense of alienation threads them together across time and space. Tempering the particular in relation to the universal, photography allows the paradoxes of the Asian American experience to register as an aesthetic of our historical-material conditions.
About the Artist:
Jarod Lew
Jarod Lew is a Chinese American artist and photographer currently based in Metro Detroit, Michigan. His work explores themes of identity, community, and displacement. His most recent project, "Please Take Off Your Shoes," addresses the contradictions inherent to constructions of Asian American identity and examines images of Asian subjects and objects within America’s suburban landscape. The series was inspired by the shocking discovery that his mother was the fiancée of Vincent Chin, who was murdered by two autoworkers in Highland Park, Michigan. The outcome of his death sparked the Asian American movement in 1982. In 2021, the project was shortlisted for the Aperture Portfolio Prize.
A portrait from his first project, "South of Heaven," was exhibited at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in 2016, and his second project, "Maybe I’ll See You There," won the PDN Emerging Photographer award. His photographs have also been exhibited at Center for Photography, Woodstock, NY; Detroit Institute of Arts; Design Museum of London; and Philharmonie de Paris. His clients include The New Yorker, The New York Times, Financial Times Weekend, GQ, and NPR.
Website: jarodlew.com
Instagram: @jarodlew
Venmo: @jarod-lew
