"Aunts and Uncles," 1973
"Holiday Preparations," 1973
"Self-Portrait, Financial District, San Francisco," 1973
"Lucy Watering at Night," 1973
"Study Hall," 1973
"Living Room Scene," 1973
Jang is third-generation American. His grandparents immigrated from China and both his parents were born in California. Michael grew up in Marysville, a former gold rush town north of Sacramento, and once, perhaps surprisingly, the home of a significant Chinatown, an embattled community established not long before the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. But the photos of Jang’s family in Who Is Michael Jang? were mostly taken in the Bay Area suburb of Pacifica, where Michael—then in his early twenties—was crashing with his Uncle Monroe, Aunt Lucy, and their two kids, Chris and Cynthia….
When I look at the pictures that Michael Jang made, I don’t see a family with “not a trace of ethnic sentiment”; I see a Chinese-American family that was among the first who could even dream of this kind of middle-class comfort. Looking at the images, I immediately noticed the promotional calendar from a local Chinese grocery on the wall, the rice cooker, the aquarium with koi. In one photo, Aunt Lucy is shown talking on the phone: she wears a 1970s caftan dress and sits below a painted portrait of herself, in which she’s wearing a traditional Chinese jacket. These elements aren’t at odds with one another. By making these photographs of his relatives, Jang was doing exactly the same thing that Robert Frank, Eggleston, and Winogrand did. He was capturing the particularities of modern life.
“Michael Jang’s American Portraits,” Madeline Leung Coleman.