“Meet the Artist” with Jarod Lew and John Shen

Thursday, October 29, 2026
Doors at 5:30pm. Artist talk at 6pm.
CPW gallery, 25 Dederick Street, Kingston, NY
Free and open to the public. Coffee, tea, and snacks are served.

On Thursday, October 29, we welcome Jarod Lew and John Shen (Woodstock AIRs) to “Meet the Artist.” Lew will present an overview of his work and practice. Shen will talk in depth about three ongoing bodies of work: Straw Inscriptions, After Image, and Stranger In The Land. The talk will trace how his practice moves between experimental photographic processes, personal history, and questions of memory, identity, and belonging. From handmade cameras, durational image making, and infrared photography, Shen will reflect on how different technologies shape not only the images we make, but also the ways we understand ourselves and the world around us.

“Meet the Artist” takes place on select Thursday evenings at CPW, with talks by local and visiting artists. The series offers the public a chance to get to know new work, hear about artistic processes, and meet friends and other local artists.

“Meet the Artist” is made possible by grants from the Arnold & Augusta Newman Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. AIR support is from the Phillip and Edith Leonian Foundation.

Jarod Lew is an artist who draws on photography to explore intergenerational encounters with diasporic loss, displacement, and postmemory. 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 exhibited in the SFMOMA group exhibition Kinship: Photography and Connection in 2023. 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 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 San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. His work has been written about in Aperture, Artforum, Elephant Magazine, and Aesthetica Magazine. Lew received his MFA in photography from the Yale School of Art.

John Shen is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice explores the shifting relationship between the apparatus, image, memory, and object. Born in China and raised in New Zealand, he works across photography, painting, moving image, and performance, using historical processes and contemporary techniques to explore how images shape personal memory, identity, and belonging.

Shen’s work includes direct positive photographs made with a handmade camera constructed from drinking straws, infrared photographs made across the United States, first-person drone footage, and custom-built Schlieren imaging apparatuses that render otherwise invisible movements of air visible. Each experiment in process offers a different way to understand his relationship with intimacy, embodiment, dislocation, and memory.

These explorations of technology are grounded in the personal subjects that motivate the work. The straw inscriptions are imprints of intimate encounters with friends and family, while his infrared photographs of the American landscape consider his place as an immigrant. His work using FPV drones and 360-degree cameras shifts between embodied and disembodied perspectives, grappling with discombobulation driven by video games, virtual reality, and drone warfare. Schlieren imaging extends this inquiry toward the incorporeal as it relates to love and desire. Rather than using technology to produce a complete, self-contained representation, Shen uses each apparatus to reveal the gaps between what can be recorded and what can be felt.

Shen received his MFA in Photography from the Yale School of Art in 2026 and his BFA in Photography and Painting from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2020.