‘Who is Michael Jang?’ Is a View of the Artist as Performer in SF DocFest Debut

Michael Jang is an authentic San Francisco character. He is also a gifted photographer. You didn’t know? Michael Jacobs is here to help.

Jacobs’ fascinating portrait, Who is Michael Jang?, has its world premiere Thursday, May 30 at the Roxie on opening night of the San Francisco Documentary Film Festival (aka SF DocFest). The screening shapes up to be a raucous celebration of a cult NorCal figure, with Jacobs beaming from the edges of the spotlight.

The self-effacing Marin County documentary maker made a splash with his 2007 debut, Audience of One, the jaw-dropping saga of a Pentecostal minister of a small congregation in the Richmond who declares out of the blue that God has instructed him to make a film. Not a homemade inspirational parable, however, but a multimillion-dollar sci-fi epic.

Since its long-ago festival run Audience of One has only been available as a hard-to-find DVD — it’s never been licensed to a streaming platform — yet it’s one of those docs that sticks in the memory. That’s a Michael Jacobs trademark: audiences forget his name but not his characters and stories. (His 2014 short doc The High Five honored gay major league ballplayer Glenn Burke, who introduced the high five celebration with Dodger teammate Dusty Baker in 1977.)

Jacobs met Jang when they shared the bill at a Pop-Up Magazine show in 2015. Jacobs and Barry Jenkins (pre-Moonlight) presented a short, Boxing Gym, they shot in Oakland. Jang showed some of the headshots he took of local contestants trying out to be meteorologists for a local newscast in the late 1980s (which are included, thankfully, in Who is Michael Jang?).

“He presented the Summer Weather images and told this very, very funny and endearing and engaging story about how he came to take these pictures and the different types of people that showed up,” Jacobs recalls. “I was just immediately captivated by his images and by his personality.”

One of the themes of Who is Michael Jang? is the artist’s frustration at not being recognized early on for a remarkable body of work that encompassed punk shows, Asian American protests and family get-togethers (that magically transcend personal mementos). Jang encountered discrimination as a Chinese American photographer, and his subsequent decision to focus on commercial photography to support his family essentially took him off the radar for curators and critics.

Plenty of artists would have used an introduction like the Pop-Up Magazine encounter to pitch themselves to Jacobs as a documentary subject. But not Michael Jang.

“I’m not sure what occurs to him and what doesn’t when it comes to the ways in which he wants to share his work with the world,” Jacobs says. “I think he’s always been more focused on being recognized in fine art settings and museum and gallery settings.”

During the pandemic, Jang devised a public art campaign with a caustic thread of sociopolitical commentary. Mining his archives, he created and pasted posters and collages on boarded-up Clement Street storefronts. Jang was responding, in part, to the increase in anti-Asian violence triggered by a certain public figure’s inflammatory description of COVID-19 as “the Chinese virus.”

Meanwhile, the fact that the new work repurposed old photographs — bringing the past into the present — may have something to do with why locked-down San Franciscans connected with it. Jang also photographed and posted his street art on Instagram. Enter, or re-enter, Mike Jacobs.

“My curiosity was piqued about who this guy is and what exactly he was doing and why I wasn’t more familiar with him,” Jacobs recalls. “And why other people that I knew who paid attention to photography and fine art and culture weren’t familiar with him either.”

Who is Michael Jang?, which clocks in at an unusual 42 minutes, and airs on PBS this fall or next winter, pulls off the thrilling trick of being an expression of its maker and a work of art in its own right, without upstaging its talented subject.

Jacobs and editor Clayton Worfolk mix and match the usual doc elements — a vast array of archival footage, contemporary interviews and verité footage (a downhill run of Jang’s skateboard friends to Ocean Beach, Jang in character and costume as the cigarette-smoking Chef Jang, a cook at Brandon Jew’s Chinatown establishment Mister Jiu’s) — to establish a solid San Francisco backdrop, dissolve time (to erase the distance between the past and the present) and honor the mystery at the core of Jang’s creativity.

“We knew Michael’s interview was going to be direct to camera, where the audience was going to get the opportunity to meet his eye and look at him in that one-on-one relationship,” Jacobs explains. “With the other [interview] subjects, we decided that black-and-white would be a nod to his still photography and the way he created these beautiful Leica snapshots. It also supported the transitions to archival through different eras of storytelling.”

The documentary incorporates 8mm and 16mm film reels from Jang’s childhood; family photographs from the 1950s and ’60s; as well as his fine art photography from the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s. Along with introducing Jang to audiences who didn’t know him, Jacobs was determined to provide fresh context and new information for people who are familiar with the photographer’s work.

“Some of these scenes are a bit more out of context from a traditional biographical documentary, skateboarding or the kitchen scene,” he notes. “They are small moments but they illustrate the real visceral immediacy of an artist living, working, breathing in the city. And some of the things he reveals in the storytelling, whether it’s his kids or things he talks about at the end of the film, those are things that he’s probably shared with very few people.”

Arguably the most thought-provoking element, though, is Jang’s recurring performance as Chef Jang. It’s an important piece of the documentary, denoting Jang’s collaboration with the filmmaker while conveying his autonomy and authority.

“It’s very difficult working with a living artist because they’re very particular — with good reason — about the ways in which they’re being perceived,” Jacobs says. “Michael’s had articles written about him, he’s had gallery shows and his work is featured in museums, but a documentary’s different. It’s going to be how I want the audience to perceive his life and times. We’re going to make choices that he may not like or agree with.

“That’s a delicate, delicate balance with a documentary subject who has never really been exposed in this way,” Jacobs continues. “I really empathize with that. Being an artist is already living with a certain amount of vulnerability, and that vulnerability is only heightened with cameras and filmmakers.”

Jacobs developed a level of trust with Jang that is palpable on screen. Yes, they bonded as visual artists — voyeurs — who shoot and interpret real life. But they also share a private childish joy at circumventing the gatekeepers.

“Something that I love about Michael, that he says early in the film, is he and I absolutely can relate to each other [because] he was sneaking into places to take pictures where he wasn’t permitted,” Jacobs says. “With documentary I sometimes feel the same. The camera and the project is providing me a mechanism for access to a world that I wouldn’t necessarily be invited to, and I wouldn’t necessarily be a part of in my everyday life.”

‘Who is Michael Jang?’ screens with ‘Kim Jong, Alfaman and The Probe: A LeMons Race’ at 8:30 p.m. and 10:30 p.m. on Thursday, May 30 at the Roxie Theater as part of SF DocFest. It is also available to stream online May 30–June 9, 2024.