The craze continues today, Ruizendaal said, with televised puppet shows and Web sites dedicated to puppets that provide information on each character's biography and birth sign, even their blood type.
"It goes far -- especially among university students," Ruizendaal said.
"It's one of the only forms of art that didn't come from China or Japan or the US. The traditional small puppets come from China, but the big puppets, with their specific Taiwanese lingo, they're a purely Taiwanese art."
And so Ruizendaal's job is as much popularization of puppetry as it is preservation. His main tasks, he explains, are making new plays based on traditional ones, creating a new audience for live puppet theater and promoting it abroad.
TTT works closely with theaters in Cambodia, Myanmar, Indonesia and India.
Last year they toured 12 countries. This year they'll take in five countries, including a second appearance at London's Victoria and Albert Museum.
Despite the considerable attention he's received in local media for his work, Ruizendaal doesn't find it strange that the task of preserving a uniquely Taiwanese art form has fallen to a foreigner.
"I think that, in a global perspective -- in the world of the arts, at least -- the concept of `foreigner' is changing a bit. Maybe not for bus drivers ... but in the arts it's getting quite normal to have conductors from Japan working in Europe. Puppetry is just on the periphery of the arts."
TTT Puppet Theater's upcoming shadow puppet production, The Child in the Rice Paddy (
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