Premieres Monday, May 19, 2025 at 11 p.m. on KPBS TV / PBS app
“Who Is Michael Jang?” follows the elusive, once-obscure artist, Michael Jang, who is best known for his commercial photography work, as he shares his vintage prints in the streets of San Francisco during a pivotal time.
For 50 years, San Francisco artist Michael Jang kept a hidden collection of photographs he took in his 20s. Despite building a career as a commercial photographer, his candid shots capturing various communities and subcultures remained largely overlooked.
In 2021, at the age of 70, Jang decided to bring his work into the public eye by pasting reproductions of his vintage prints around San Francisco, including Chinatown where images of his Chinese-American family take on a more subversive meaning, especially amid the rise of anti-Asian hate and violence in the city.
Filmmaker Quote:
“Unfortunately, it’s all too common for incredible and interesting artists to get overlooked,” said director Michael Jacobs. “I am excited for audiences to be just as captivated and in awe of not just Jang’s art and photos, but of Michael Jang as a person.”
The documentary captures Jang’s exploits as his experimental street art morphs into a meta-exploration of Jang’s personal history and identity. In the process, the film bears witness to Jang getting reacquainted with his younger self through decades-old images that resonate with vital, new meaning today.
“Michael Jang’s art is clever and mischievous,” said Lois Vossen, INDEPENDENT LENS executive producer. “In a time when the high-art photography world had no place for anything funny, Jang stayed true to himself and captured the quirky and often humorous aspects of everyday life. His visual storytelling is really funny and—like this documentary—both informative and entertaining.”
The documentary received funding via ITVS’s Open Call Initiative.
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