Ping Chong

Ping Chong (Chinese: 張家平; pinyin: Zhāng Jiāpíng; born Toronto, Ontario, Canada, 1946) is an American contemporary theater director, choreographer, video and installation artist. He was born in Toronto and raised in the Chinatown section of New York City. Chong is internationally recognized as a director, writer, and multi-disciplinary artist, and is considered a seminal figure in Asian American theatre and the Asian American arts movement.

Originally trained as a visual artist and filmmaker at the School of Visual Arts and Pratt Institute, he began his theatrical career as a member of Meredith Monk's The House Foundation. He created his first independent theatre work, Lazarus in 1972. Many of Chong’s works concern the interaction of Eastern and Western cultures and/or issues of cultural diversity, and frequently draw on documentary and interview-based materials (as in Undesirable Elements and Children of War).

In 1975, Chong founded Ping Chong & Company (originally called The Fiji Theatre Company). The company's mission is "to explore the meaning of contemporary theatre and art on a national and international level," and "to create and tour innovative multi-disciplinary works of theater and art, which explore the intersections of history, race, art and technology in the modern world."[1][2] The company has created and toured more than 50 works by Chong and his collaborators, which have been presented at major theatres, performing arts centres, and arts festivals around the world. In 1985 Chong directed Nosferatu and Nuit Blanche and in 1986, Kind Ness at La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club. In an interview with director/performer Pablo Vela and photographer Allen Frame, Chong discusses his early work: “The results [of Nosferatu] were very much in line with my own philosophy and thinking, even though it was a surprise to me the way it turned out, because the whole Nosferatu idea goes back a long way for me, even before I started to do theater, still, the results were consistent with everything I’ve done. If you see Nuit Blanche next to Nosferatu, which was five years later, you can still see the consistency, even though certainly there are some differences. The original ideas I was interested in are still there—the issue of man and his other. Originally, the idea was, what if a vampire were just like us. The only difference being their eating habits. What happens then? It’s always this thing of the mirror—of your other, of man and his other.”.

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