Pink Fang: Inheriting a Legacy, Building a Future, Connecting Islands

In 2022, after five decades of groundbreaking work, theatremaker Ping Chong retired and left his company with a rare gift and a genuine challenge. “If I’m no longer making the work,” he said, “take my name off the door.”

What followed was not a quick rebrand, but a three-year process of listening, reflection, and reimagining. Out of that process came Pink Fang, a name born from a mangling of Ping’s name, but reclaimed as a distortion, subversively and intentionally carrying history while opening space for what comes next. Today, Pink Fang is guided by a three-person leadership team that sets the vision for curation, fundraising, partnerships, and organizational development. Each leader is personally connected to the company’s legacy in distinct ways, and each contributes expertise across artistic creation, community engagement, and producing strategy—collectively advancing Pink Fang’s mission and honoring the organization’s artistic legacy.

Naming is never neutral. It is always an action, sometimes of survival, sometimes of transformation, sometimes of joy.

Later this spring, Pink Fang will release the Year Three Transition Report, which provides an in-depth look into the third year of the organization’s three-year transition period following the retirement of Ping and Ping Chong and Company executive director Bruce Allardice in 2022. The report completes the series of three reports, which comprehensively share the strategy, challenges, experiences, and learnings from the founder succession and leadership transition. In documenting this period through this report and reflections, Pink Fang has created a fieldwide resource for organizational transition.

This essay brings together three voices from the new leadership team, each reflecting on a different facet of that transition. One of us honors legacy and the power of naming. Another looks at the infrastructure and care required to sustain artists and communities. The third looks toward new work, connection, and possibility. Together, these reflections offer an inside view of an arts organization choosing to meet change not with fear, but with curiosity, and inviting audiences, partners, and communities to imagine the future alongside us.

The First Act: Inheriting a Legacy, Naming a Future

By Sara Zatz

I first met Ping Chong as a college intern in 1997. I spent a semester being mentored by Bruce Allardice and Ping while living in the unheated attic dormitory of La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club. I learned to drink vodka with Buryat throat singers from Mongolia, mingled with the members of Slant—including Perry Yung, who now serves on Pink Fang’s board—and soaked in the ethos of the experimental theatre scene of the East Village in the 1990s. In 2000, I was back as a freelance production coordinator on Secret History, an Undesirable Elements production at the Ohio Theater. The production transformed my understanding of theatrical storytelling, showing me how an ensemble of individual voices can weave into a collective and translate isolation into connection. In 2002, I joined the company full time in a role created to codify and expand the impact of Undesirable Elements.

In creating the Undesirable Elements series, Ping developed a form of documentary performance rooted in lived experience, shared with authenticity, because the person on stage is telling their own true story. Each production begins with the storytellers introducing themselves, where and when they were born, and the story of their name.

Naming is never neutral. It is always an action, sometimes of survival, sometimes of transformation, sometimes of joy. This is the enduring hold of Undesirable Elements. Simple structure. Infinite variation. Names become windows into personal and political histories, immigration, assimilation, queerness, resistance, love, trauma, and survival.

So, when Ping requested, on his retirement, that we (then-Interim artistic leadership team) rename the company, this task became an existential charge, an honor, and a weighty responsibility. Our first instinct was to ask, “What is Ping Chong and Company without Ping Chong?” The better question, we realized, was, “Who are we, now, as a collection of artists working at the intersection of creative generation, community building, and social transformation?”

This was more than a branding exercise. It was a ritual of re-articulation, even reincarnation. Like naming a child, choosing a new name is a commitment, emotional, public, and permanent. There were lists and lists of names. There were almosts and maybes. Some sounded safe but uninspired. Others felt clever but hollow.

Finally, in an off-hand comment, someone (I think it was me?) threw out the name Pink Fang. In the late nineties, around the time of my internship, a letter arrived at the company misaddressed to “Pink Fang.” It was a malapropism of Ping’s name—humorous, accidental, and oddly evocative. It became a running joke and, eventually, even the name of the office Wi-Fi network.

At first, Pink Fang felt too irreverent. But what started as an offhand quip slowly took on a magnetic pull. A name mispronounced, reclaimed, made powerful. It acknowledged the very real experience of being misnamed—of having one's identity casually mangled and erased—and transformed it into something unforgettable.

When we shared it with Ping and Bruce, they laughed and embraced it. Pink Fang begins and ends with the letters of Ping’s name, carrying history without clinging to it. It honors legacy while clearing space for reinvention. It’s punk and poetic. It invites curiosity, not conclusion.

When Ping retired and requested that the name of the organization change with his departure, it was an act of generosity that reflected his values as an artist. 

Ping has often said that the power of Undesirable Elements lies in “claiming your name in public.” Renaming the company took three years because it required us to find ourselves and find our narrative before we were ready to claim our name in public. Arriving at Pink Fang required an intentional departure from tradition, a choice rooted in love and audacity. It makes space for complexity. For contradiction. For multiple lineages. It resists flattening. It resists erasure.

After nearly twenty-five years with the company, I often feel my entire identity is intertwined with this history and work. Without Ping and Bruce, and the company, there would be no me, as I now am, nor would I have grown into the artist or leader I have become. My call to action is rooted in one of Ping’s favorite phrases, from the author E.M. Forster: “Only Connect.” My superpower is building spaces of deep listening, connection, and belonging. In every workshop, whether with artists, high school students, nurses, or older adults, we begin by sharing the story of our names, and that glimmering spark of connection, of possibility.

And this reminds us, again and again, that naming is never the end of the story. It is the beginning.

The Second Act: Building the Future We Name

By Jane Jung 

The first time I encountered the work of Ping Chong, I was an undergraduate in a multicultural theatre practicum. I read the script SlutforArt and felt a distance from it while simultaneously feeling drawn in. The worlds inside were poetic, layered, and unlike anything I had envisioned on stage before. Years later, after graduate school, I moved to New York and joined Ping Chong and Company as general manager in 2010.

I left in 2014 for another role, thinking I might not be back. But in 2018, I returned—first part time, then as managing director in 2019, alongside longtime executive director Bruce Allardice. I stepped into that role, the COVID pandemic hit, and during that time, Ping and Bruce made the decision to officially retire from the company by the end of 2022. For decades, “Ping Chong and Company” was both a name and a person to some, the duo of Ping and Bruce to others. It was hard to imagine the company without Ping and Bruce. With no roadmap for what leadership would look like after the two of them stepped down, we embarked on a journey to make one.

This is where all the nuts and bolts of the strategic planning, succession, and transition period came into play. It was an intense journey guided by a commitment to the ongoing mission, belief in the value and impact of the work, and respect for each other as human beings. During that time, my life was transformed by moments of loss and renewal—becoming a mother and losing my own mother at the same time—and I returned to this work with an acute recognition and sense of care. Care for the people who make the art. Care for the communities who share their stories with us. Care for the infrastructure that allows both to flourish. We are here only because we are the recipients of such care over time.

When Ping retired and requested that the name of the organization change with his departure, it was an act of generosity that reflected his values as an artist—true to himself without it being about building up an institution around ego or personality. It was also a daunting challenge. We felt the obligation of an inheritance and saw it as a chance to honor the values and artistic rigor he built while giving ourselves permission to lead in our own voices. Embracing a co-leadership model, a structure I was initially skeptical about, became an integral part of this process. For some, co-leadership can translate to blurred decision-making or slowing things down. I see it now as asset-based leadership, an idea brought forth by Chanon Judson at a roundtable discussion at our very first Ping Chong and Company transition events; it means recognizing the distinct strengths of each person at the table and trusting that the whole is stronger than any one of us.

Renaming the company to Pink Fang was one of those moments that tested and affirmed that trust. The name carried legacy—the letters of Ping’s name and the company’s particular brand of humor—but also signaled a leap into the future. My role was to make sure that leap landed: aligning our mission, updating our structures and systems, and introducing ourselves anew to partners and audiences. Naming was the visible part. Building the foundation for it to thrive was the invisible work.

I believe in leadership that makes space—for unexpected and unfamiliar voices, for personal and collective growth and transformation, for bold and grounded risk-taking, for artists to expand the definition of what theatre and artmaking can be. That’s the work ahead for Pink Fang.

My invitation is simple: Partner with us on projects that deepen trust and bridge divides. Bring our workshops to your schools, senior centers, and community spaces. Support the infrastructure that allows artists to be daring. Names matter—but what we do with them matters more.

I now understand that my entire artistic life has been intertwined with the ethos and legacy and mission of this organization. Everything I’ve done has led me to this moment. 

The Future Act: The Work of Connecting Islands

By Mei Ann Teo 

I first encountered Ping as a mentor. In our first meeting, he asked about my background, was thrilled to hear I was from Singapore, and shared that he came from a family of Chinese opera performers. It felt like kismet, as my first memories of theatre are of being six years old and wandering around the wooden planks of the pop-up Chinese opera theatres in the parking lot of our housing estate. Even in that first moment, I experienced Ping’s eyes sparkling with curiosity, fueled with no forced agenda but the inevitability that we will find a connection. When he mentored me, I loved the practical and succinct clarity of his one note. It was a piece about an imprisoned Chinese dissident, and the note was: “The actor is too well-fed.”

Years later, when I was invited into Ping Chong and Company’s interim transitional co-leadership team, it wasn’t through a job posting. It was through relationships—a process that took time, trust, and alignment. The position was open when I was finally ready for it. They weren’t trying to fill a slot, but wanted to craft a team that could best envision how the organization could or should continue. That intentionality is rare in our field, and I wanted to make sure that not only would it be the right next step for me, but that I would be right for the organization.

As I traced my journey to this moment, I started to understand how each step brought me here. Prior to this, I had served in several artistic leadership positions at smaller and larger organizations in New York and across the country. I learned much there about building theatre communities and navigating leadership changes. I had been a professor and taught at Hampshire College (where I witnessed Ping’s and Talvin Wilks’s work at Amherst with Collidescope 2.0) as well as many other institutions, learning to be a perpetual student. Most importantly, as a theatremaker, much of my work stems from real events and lived experience.

I now understand that my entire artistic life has been intertwined with the ethos and legacy and mission of this organization. Everything I’ve done has led me to this moment—to co-lead what has become my artistic home and help ensure that it remains an artistic home for existing and future artists. This is a home where their work, their stories, and their voices can thrive. It is a place that honors its legacy while fully embracing the future.

When the idea of renaming to Pink Fang emerged, it took a lot of introspection. For me, it came down to managing director Jane Jung’s clarity that it would be “reclaiming a distortion.” That’s the secret mission of Pink Fang for me—one that is playful, tender, and fierce. It echoes Ping’s humor and curiosity—the kind that asks us to lean in, laughing into the unknown. As artistic director of new work, I call on this name to open creative doors. Pink Fang is a name that demands us to be bolder and unexpected in reclaiming distortions.

This year alone, I’m developing works with artists Erika Chong Shuch on insatiability and the question “What is enough?”; Sugar Vendil on her Filipinx childhood rendered through embodied music; Jeena Yi, Josep Maria Miró, Deepa Purohit, Vichet Chum, and Katie Đỗ, all writing powerfully on the multiplicity of ways in which we grieve family; Sanjit De Silva and Jord Liu, who are working on deeply personal works about what happens to us in the heat of revolution; and also reid tang, Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig, Kristina Wong, and Sarah Mantell—each one an extraordinary artist whose work roots me in the belief that connection, even in the smallest of moments, can help us see what is.

My favorite Ping saying is: “All islands connect underwater.” That’s the ethos and legacy of Ping Chong, and it is my modus operandi. In a time when it’s challenging to not spiral into the despair of the news cycle, we have to hold fast to each other. Connect with us. Collaborate with us. Let’s make art that bridges the distances between us. Pink Fang isn’t just a name. It’s a commitment—to curiosity, to connection, and to the audacity to continue.