Robin Ruizendaal's enthusiasm for preserving Taiwan's puppetry, one of the nation's most important folk arts, shows no sign of abating -- at least compared to his Dutch ancestors' commitment to preserve the country's aboriginal culture nearly 400 years ago.
"China always wants Taiwan back. So do we Dutch," joked the scholar when he first arrived in 1992.
From Rembrandt and Confucius to grass-root puppeteers and funeral strippers, Ruizendaal's research interests appear both academic and unconventional.
Those are also appropriate adjectives for the immensely popular National Palace Museum exhibition Formosa: Taiwan, Holland and East Asia in the 17th Century, of which Ruizendaal is one of the curators.
Born in the Netherlands in 1963, Ruizendaal started learning Chinese at the age of 19 and read through the "Four Books and Five Classics" of the Confucian school, tomes even native Chinese struggle to understand.
Majoring in sinology at Holland's Leiden University for his first degree, Ruizendaal said he found translating the Chinese classics one of the trickiest parts of his studies. "I really hated translating the classics," he said.
Nevertheless, it is difficult to imagine that Ruizendaal, who now speaks fluent Mandarin, once had a hard time with the language. He even managed to learn a little bit of Taiwanese.
One of the reasons Ruizendaal chose to study Chinese is because the language is difficult. "Chinese is difficult. It never bores me," he said.
As a child, Ruizendaal's interest in the East was sparked by his grandparents' accounts of the remote world. His grandparents once lived in Indonesia and had traveled to China and Japan.
Ruizendaal, like many Dutch, speaks several languages fluently. Apart from Chinese, he is also good at English, French and German.
In the past, foreigners who were interested in learning Taiwanese were mainly missionaries because the language enabled them to gain access to people in rural areas.
While Taiwanese allowed the missionaries to touch the lives of the nation's people, Ruizendaal uses his puppetry to probe into Chinese culture both in China and Taiwan.
History is also a useful way to understand a country's culture but Ruizendaal does not trust in the official version of Chinese history. He believes the garbled official version is not reliable.
"Puppetry, in contrast, exhibits the people's language, music, literature and religion," Ruizendaal said, adding that the puppets also show the arts of sculpture and embroidery.
"Puppetry is the people's art. It cannot survive without an audience," he said.
Ruizendaal wrote his PhD dissertation on Chinese marionette theater and is currently the director of the TTT Puppet Center in Taipei.
To study puppetry, Ruizendaal went to China for the first time in 1986. In the following years he worked with four puppetry troupes in the rural areas of Fujian Province.
Talking about why the National Palace Museum generated the idea to launch the exhibition and why he was selected as one of the curators, Ruizendaal revealed that a smaller exhibition on a similar theme three years ago is behind the decision.
"In the year 2000, we launched an exhibition on the Formosan theme in Taipei's Tamshui, which drew more than 130,000 visitors," he said.
The exhibition was so successful that Tu Cheng-sheng (杜正勝), director of the museum, thought it would be an interesting idea to have a bigger exhibition on the same theme.
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