Chinese Puppet Doll

Photo of the 3D model of Maria de Lourdes Orozco Cuautle's Chinese Puppet Doll created by Phillip Ruscica.

My exhibit focuses on the Chinese Puppet Doll from Maria de Lourdes Orozco Cuautle's collection. As the name implies, this doll, and others like it, were used in the Chinese theatre as a performed object, manipulated by the hands of puppeteers. Focusing primarily on the sensation of touch, I wish to render a virtual tactile experience through my exhibit, where visitors are encouraged to imagine and envision how the doll is held and moved by a puppeteer, imagining its size and weight, the feeling of its materials.

There are few concrete dates to go by when it comes to the long history of the Chinese glove puppet theatre (布袋戏). Nonetheless, its origins have been traced back to around the 1300s in Fujian (福建), a southern province in China (Ruizendaal 2015, 67). Towards the end of the Ming dynasty in approximately 1850, migrants brought the theatre southeast to Taiwan (Department of Education 1996, 17).

Glove puppetry was performed as tribute to the Gods, with temporary stages constructed outside of temples between the 14^th and 19^th centuries (Mason 2016, 227). However, the glove puppet theatre also became a popular form of low-brow entertainment. Comparatively, other forms of theatre, or even puppet theatre (such as string puppetry), acquired higher-brow status (Chia 2019, 24).