Wall of Jang
Michael Jang, Photography by Christopher Bernard
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Wall 1: Early in October 2021, I discovered that a wooden retaining wall along one of the last open lots in downtown San Francisco was plastered with full-sized photographs of charming and surreal tableaux of Chinese family life, including self-mocking portraits of the artist. The photographer seemed to go by the enigmatic name “Jang,” though whether he had also pasted up the photos was by no means clear. I had seen many of the same photos pasted up singly or in satirical combinations throughout Chinatown on planks nailed up on abandoned storefronts since the spring of this, the second year of the pandemic. And I somehow connected them with resistance to the wave of anti-Asian crimes and incidents occurring in the Bay Area and across the country since the pandemic began. Printed on thin paper and pasted up hastily, the photos must prove ephemeral in the coming rainy season on the San Francisco streets (the sky was already gray with fog), so I whipped out my old trusty Panasonic camera to commemorate, and document, the images I found so beguiling.
Wall 2: A week and a half later, I passed the wall again. I had looked up “Jang” online and discovered that the mysterious photographer was named Michael Jang, who had studied in San Francisco in the 1970s, from which time the photographs decorating Chinatown had clearly come. But I discovered, to my dismay, shock and consternation, this:
Wall 3: And a week later, I saw this.The “wall” proved far more vulnerable, and ephemeral, than even I had feared.
-- Christopher Bernard
Christopher Bernard is a founder and co-editor of Caveat Lector. His latest work is The Socialist's Garden of Verses, published by Regent Press and winner of a 2021 PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award for Excellence; it is also listed as one of the "100 Best Indie Books of 2021" by Kirkus Reviews.
Michael Jang is an American documentary photographer best known for his photographs of life in Los Angeles and San Francisco in the 1970s, with subjects ranging from his family to punk bands and street scenes. In 2019, Atelier Editions published a retrospective monograph of his work titled Who Is Michael Jang?