Reagan Louie & Jarod Lew

About Episode 113

Photographers Jarod Lew and Reagan Louie join PhotoWork with Sasha Wolf to discuss how they explore cultural identity, personal loss, and trauma through photography. Lew and Louie are Asian American photographers from different generations, and their work reflects how the exploration of cultural identity in contemporary photography has evolved over the decades. While Louie takes a documentary photography approach, Lew works through more conceptual constructs. Their conversation with Wolf highlights the visual differences between their practices while revealing striking resonances in how they discuss their approach.

About Jarod Lew

Jarod Lew is an artist who 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.

His project, Please Take Off Your Shoes was shortlisted for the Aperture Portfolio Prize in 2021, and was exhibited in a group exhibition at SFMOMA titled Kinship: Photography and Connection in 2023. His other project, In Between You and Your Shadow, examines his relationship with his mother, who was the fiancé of Vincent Chin–the subject of a hate-crime that brought national attention to matters of Asian American civil rights. In 2025, Lew will mount his first museum exhibition at the University of Michigan Museum of Art titled- Strange You Never Knew.

His works are held in public and private collections including the Cantor Art Center, Detroit Institute of Arts, Kadist, San Francisco, Harvard Art Museum, University of Michigan Museum of Art and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Lew’s work has been written about in Aperture, Artforum, Elephant Magazine, and Aesthetica Magazine.

Lew graduated with an MFA in photography at the Yale School of Art.

About Reagan Louie

Reagan Louie’s photography and installations explore global transformation and cultural identity. He is currently at work on several projects that focus on the relationship between home and homeland; including a book about his family’s immigration from China to America. And a Virtual Reality experience about his ancestral home, Wing Wor.

His work is exhibited at institutions: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Museum of Modern Art NY, Philadelphia Art Museum, Fotomuseum Winterthur, Gwangju Biennale. Louie’s photographs are in the public collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Museum of Modern Art NY, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Oakland Museum, Cantor Art Museum.

Louie’s photographs are widely published. His books have received critical acclaim. The New York Times Book Review named his first book on China, “Toward a Truer Life”, the photography book of the year.

He is the recipient of numerous awards – The Guggenheim fellowship, National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, Lange-Taylor Prize, and Fulbright Fellowship.