k*hole karaoke | Ping-Hsiang Wang: Employee of the Month (work-in-progress)
About program
Employee of the Month takes a cringecore lens to the question of twenty-first century human migration. What happens when global mobility, aspiration, and cultural stereotypes collide in the form of Emilia, a rabbit mascot sent by a Chinese multinational to represent her firm at the fictional European Mascot Resources Expo?
What desires drive her secret ambition to “bunny-hop” into a better life in Europe—an escape from China’s stagnating economy and increasingly oppressive politics? And what does it mean that her knowledge of Europe is shaped less by lived experience and more by Emily in Paris?
As Emilia’s story unfolds, we ask: how do fantasies of belonging meet the realities of tokenism, identity politics, and the “model minority” myth that many East Asian emigrants face? Can one truly escape one’s place of origin, or does migration simply shift the terms of constraint?
Through this project, we are researching how satire, performance, and the absurd might open space for thinking about national identity, cultural aspiration, and the contradictions of global labor. Rather than offering answers, Employee of the Month seeks to stage the instability of belonging itself.
Duration
15–20 minutes
Language
English
Admission
Voluntary
Photogallery
Creative team
k*hole karaoke
Founded by Taiwanese director Ping-Hsiang Wang and American writer Travis Jeppesen, k*hole karaoke is a performance company exploring how human behavior is reshaped by systems—material, digital, environmental, and commercial. Their work interrogates the ways in which our perceptions, desires, and actions are conditioned by the mechanics of late capitalism and mediated experience.
Their signature aesthetic transforms the everyday into the uncanny—transposing familiar landscapes into hyperreal, often surreal digital environments. Theater, for them, is not just a stage but a perceptual technology—an apparatus for decoding reality and proposing new modes of communication.
Fusing language, movement, sound, livestreams, objects, and scenography, K-hole Karaoke constructs performances where narrative becomes a fully immersive, sensory architecture. Each work invites audiences to step into a world where meaning is layered, unstable, and constantly remade.
| Artistic team | Ping-Hsiang Wang, Yi-Wei Tien, Dandan Liu, Iñigo Giner Miranda, Paul Bonomo |
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| Supported by | HAU Hebbel am Ufer, TATWERK | Performative Forschung, Freies Werkstatt Theater, Gouvernement, Fonds Darstellende Künste with funds from the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media |
Thank you!
