Ping Chong is a New York-based multimedia theatre artist who has created innovative theatrical works since the early 1970s and is the recipient of major awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and the National Medal of Arts. Despite his significant contribution to contemporary theatre, scholarly attention to his oeuvre has been relatively meagre. As Yuko Kurahashi notes, Chong is a Chinese American artist who has addressed issues of identity and marginalization through storytelling, and ‘some might have a hesitancy to examine him strictly as an avant-garde artist’ (p. 5). His theatre is, in many ways, both experimental and conventional, and it has been difficult to define and categorize his work in a singular way. Kurahashi's book is the first comprehensive study of Chong's theatre. It provides detailed descriptions of almost all his works and puts them in the context of Chong's biography and development as an artist. The book is structured chronologically in eleven chapters and offers a rich analysis of the vast range of his theatrical styles and major themes.

Starting with Chong's transpacific family history and his parents’ background in Cantonese opera, the book situates his artistic beginning in New York's Chinatown. The sense of ‘otherness’ that Chong felt in himself and observed in others became a cornerstone for all of his work, and Kurahashi is careful to underscore the impact of his personal experiences on his art. But she also emphasizes the encounters and collaborations that have been indispensable to Chong. Beginning with Meredith Monk, numerous collaborators around the world are listed in the book, and Kurahashi makes it clear that Chong and the company he founded in 1975 – Ping Chong and Company – have depended on his collaboration with actors, dancers, poets, filmmakers, choreographers and performance artists. This balance between personal experience and collaboration has been Chong's central approach to theatre, and Kurahashi foregrounds his unique aesthetics while acknowledging the richness of his collaborative approach.

While the core aim of the book is to describe Chong's oeuvre in a comprehensive way, it also presents a number of key theoretical concepts to explain his theatre. For instance, bricolage, a French term for ‘improvisation or a piece of makeshift handwork’, is used repeatedly throughout the book to describe how Chong sees his theatre: ‘a new world created out of any and all available materials from an old world, resulting in luminosity’ (p. 39). Chong creates his theatre by juxtaposing and defamiliarizing objects and ideas and by creating new associations and framings. At many moments in the book Kurahashi provides thick descriptions of how he assembles different pieces together and what results from such processes of bricolage. She quotes Chong saying that he just wants to tell ‘interesting stories’ and avoids ‘over-intellectualizing and theorizing’, but his work is intellectual and theoretical (p. 8). Kurahashi is successful in allowing some of the key theoretical questions to emerge from the descriptions she provides. Indeed, the book provides an excellent groundwork for further theorization of Chong's theatre in future studies.

Because she had access to Chong's unpublished scripts as well as his personal archive, Kurahashi's analysis of Chong's work is exceedingly detailed, and because she also interviewed Chong, her book is an accurate representation of how Chong sees his own work and his career that spans almost fifty years. Kurahashi presents Chong's theatre as ‘poetic and associative’ and traces its beginning in the 1970s under the influence of the Fluxus and other avant-garde movements in New York City, but she also explains how Chong has created and expanded his style of interdisciplinary theatre (p. 41). His more recent works have included the East/West Quartet, which traces the historical encounters between the East and the West, and the Undesirable Elements series, which is based on oral histories of local communities. Chong's theatre has also included puppet theatre and collaborations with schools and colleges. The volume and complexity of his work are indeed remarkable, and Kurahashi's book delivers a much needed and well-researched examination of one of the most important artists of contemporary theatre.