First edition of Jang by Michael Jang. First impression. Medium format hardback in new condition. Signed by the artist on the title page.

About

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.