When I was invited to go wheat-pasting on the streets with San Francisco photographer迈克尔张成泽ahead of the opening of his new exhibition, “Post No Jangs: Notes FromUnderground,” it was a given I’d say yes — as long as it was legal.
Wheat-pasting is a process of applying posters onto surfaces (usually boarded-up storefronts, construction dividers and other temporary structures) named for the glue that affixes them. How officially accepted wheat-pasting, also known as wild posting, is can be murky. Advertisers have long used wheat-paste campaigns, but there’s also a parallel tradition of street art intervening with those pastings and either posting over them or transforming them into new, ironic commentaries.
Jang did both on the boards covering the front of the former Goodwill store at 820 Clement St. during my time with him on12月7日。空间是一个where he has been creating wheat-paste murals of his photographs since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic shutdown in March 2020. Large reproductions from his 1973 series “The Jangs,” documenting the assimilation of his Chinese American family in Marysville (Yuba County), photos from his time as a student atCalifornia Institute of the Arts在1970年代,和图像的旧金山的朋克rock scene and street culture have all adorned the storefront over the past three years.
As the71-year-old rapidly applied the paste with a paint roller and then smoothed the postings onto the wood before it dried, he projected an aura of cool that felt like a throwback to the late 20th century, but also eternally San Francisco. In his dark denim jacket (with “Jang” printed in white on the back), sunglasses, S.F. cap and flannel hoodie pulled up, he’s exactly who you would cast as a badass photo artist.He even plays an appropriate Lou Reed soundtrack from the speaker on his bike as he works.
Jang eyed the posters drying on the boards and quickly decided where he would add certain touches: a cutout photograph of Robin Williams jumping through the air applied to an ad for the Black Eyed Peas; his upside-down signature pasted over Michael Jackson posters; black-and-white Beatles “Revolver” collages laid out in Warholian repetition; and a photo of his daughter, Tali, as an infant.
Jang moved to the city in the 1970s to attend the San Francisco Art Institute and built a successful career in the city as a commercial photographer. Recognition for his street photos and earlier documentary work didn’t come until 2001, when he submitted his portfolio to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where he is now featured in the permanent collection. In 2019, the McEvoy Foundation for the Arts presented the exhibition “Michael Jang’s California,” and that same year his first monograph book, “Who Is Michael Jang?,” was released by Atelier Éditions.
His new show, “Post No Jangs: Notes FromUnderground,” is being exhibited at Crown Point Press by the Lee Gallery of Winchester, Mass., and will be on view through Dec. 31.
“Post No Jangs” isn’t a conventional photo exhibition with pristine prints in a stark gallery, and that’s by design. Jang wanted the show to “speak in my own voice” and center his from-the-street, punk-referencing style. Visitors are immediately greeted by a “garbage pile” of leaning plywood covered with Jang wheat-pastings and graffiti. Images are presented as found objects: reproductions pasted to doors, cutouts applied to painted wood and freestanding sandwich boards.
In an area curtained off with hanging beads, Jang re-created his college dorm room, complete with David Bowie posters and a fake San Francisco Chronicle badge he made to get access to otherwise off-limit venues. Perhaps the most conventional presentation of a work on view (in a way) is “Mona Lee,” a take on da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa” in which a Jang photograph of an Asian American newscaster substitutes for the original; it even has an ornate gold frame.
But it’s his guerrilla-style public work that most informs the show. During the pandemic, when galleries were at first inaccessible, his displays on Clement, in Chinatown and on the Great Highway became a significant part of his artistic practice — a term that makes himflinch.
“I don’t like art speak,” said Jang. The wheat-pasting “starts in the very beginning with fun as the main reason for doing it. I have been educated and fortunate enough to have gone to Cal Arts and the San Francisco Art Institute, so I know a little bit about that, and having some art heroes like (Lee) Friedlander or (John) Baldessari, and I did my own research on wonderful people like Warhol and Basquiat.
“I’ll probably never be able to aspire to that kind of greatness or notoriety, but I can just do what they do in my own way.” Jang stops for a second, then finishes the thought. “It’s kind of turned out to be an original thing.”
“Post No Jangs” will have a relatively limited run in the gallery, but rest assured, if you know where to look, Jang’s street exhibitions remain on view.
“Post No Jangs: Notes From Underground”: 1-6 p.m. Wednesday-Saturday. Through Dec. 31. Free. Crown Point Press, 20 Hawthorne St., S.F.www.michaeljang.com
