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Puppet master pulls the strings

Dutch puppeteer Robin Ruizendaal is hoping his exhibition at the National Palace Museum will help Taiwan preserve its artistic heritage. PHOTO: COURTESY OF ROBIN RUIZENDAAL

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.

"I organized a team consisting of six people to prepare for the exhibition," Ruizendaal said.

The major difference between the show and the one three years ago is that the present exhibition contains artifacts from the Ching Dynasty, whereas the 2000 show concentrated mainly on Dutch artifacts.

Ruizendaal said that there are many aspects of the exhibition he is very happy with.

"We have obtained almost every artifact we wanted. We successfully gathered all the most important articles, including several rare objects," he said.

The layout of the exhibition space is also satisfactory, though still falling short of Ruizendaal's ideal. "We built a ship in the center of the exhibition place, which is a breakthrough in exhibition design," he said.

Dedicated in both the traditional and the contemporary arts, Ruizendaal believes more should be done to preserve Taiwan's folk culture.

The establishment of the TTT Puppet Center is part of Ruizendaal's efforts to keep one of the country's most important folk arts alive.

While visiting the Formosan show at the palace museum, perhaps visitors can think about how to leave behind more of our cultural heritage for future generations.
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