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 the Covid-19 pandemic 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.
Books
JANG
By Michael Jang
$50.00
Hardbound
7 x 9.5 inches
176 pages
150 color illustrations
ISBN: 978-1-969303-01-2
About the Author
Michael Jang spent more than four decades working as a successful commercial portrait photographer but was simultaneously creating an archive of thousands of remarkable images across several now-iconic series: The Jangs (1973), Beverly Hilton (1973), San Francisco (1973–87), Summer Weather (1983), College (1972–73), Punks & Poets (1978–80), and Garage Band (2001). Jang revealed nothing from his archive until 2001, when he submitted a selection of images for consideration to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. His work attracted immediate acclaim. His first monograph, Who Is Michael Jang?, was published in 2019, the same year his first major retrospective exhibition was mounted at the McEvoy Foundation for the Arts. The documentary Who is Michael Jang? (dir. Michael Jacobs, 2024) debuted in May 2024 at the San Francisco Documentary Film Festival. Jang’s work is in the collections of the National Gallery of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and SFMoMA, among others.