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.

San Francisco–based photographer Michael Jang spent nearly four decades working as a successful commercial portrait photographer. Unbeknownst to the world, however, he was simultaneously assembling a vast archive of thousands of remarkable images documenting, variously: college days, Hollywood celebrities, would-be weather presenters, San Francisco street scenes, his family, Bay Area punks and adolescent garage bands. Jang revealed nothing of his ever-expanding, eclectic archive for almost 40 years until 2001, when he submitted a number of images for consideration to San Francisco's Museum of Modern Art. Jang’s work attracted immediate acclaim, and for the past decade he has continued to unveil his considerable oeuvre in national and international exhibitions and monographs.

The photographer’s first major monograph, Who Is Michael Jang? highlights Jang's most important bodies of work. Introduced by his longtime collaborator and SFMOMA curator emerita of photography, Sandra Phillips, this volume offers readers a long-overdue introduction to Jang’s incredible images.

Michael Jang (born 1951) has practiced photography in San Francisco for more than 50 years. After decades of successful commercial portraiture, Jang began to revisit the vast archive of unseen, spontaneous images he has amassed, many of which betray the influence of celebrated street photographers such as Lee Friedlander, Garry Winogrand and Lisette Model.