Michael Jang: Jang

Spotlighting the subversive San Francisco street installations of the underground cult photographer Michael Jang

This volume showcases the San Francisco-based photographer Michael Jang's stylized and self-aware street art from recent years. Early in 2021, when the city was still in the grip of Covid-19 and ugly instances of anti-Asian sentiment were on the rise, Jang clandestinely wheat-pasted some of the images from his black-and-white photographic series The Jangs (1973) over a boarded-up Goodwill storefront on Clement Street, in the heart of San Francisco's unofficial Chinatown. He branded his photographs with a JANG stencil logo--introducing the persona "Chef Jang," a chain-smoking wok master--and interspersed them with hand-designed posters and graphics that parody Asian product packaging and menus. Inserted into the visual landscape of this once bustling neighborhood, Jang's gesture was one of solidarity, belonging and ownership. In JANG, the artist captures his own ephemeral and ever-changing urban interventions in more than 100 new photographs.
Throughout the '70s and '80s, American photographer Michael Jang (born 1951) accrued an extensive body of work, capturing family members, art school life and various Californian milieus--ranging from Hollywood high-life parties to the San Francisco punk scene. After 50 years as a commercial and portrait photographer, Jang decided to share these underground shots with the world, quickly garnering a reputation as a hidden gem of social documentary as well as a master of the deadpan self-portrait.