During the 19th century, traditional glove puppetry was introduced from Fujian Province in China to Taiwan. After arriving on the shores of Taiwan, gradually developing into a locally distinctive type of theater by incorporating unique Min vocal styles and temple culture from both south and north of Taiwan. From 1950 to 1970, the Golden Puppet Theater（金光布袋戲）with The Scholar Swordsman Shih Yen-Wen as its main feature started to take over the television. It became the Taiwanese people’s main source of entertainment and replaced the outdoor puppet shows, which emphasized the five-tone vocalization（五音口白）, delicate puppetry skills, and the use of traditional gongs and drums as accompaniment music. The three National Taiwan University professors who initiated and established the Seden Glove Puppetry Foundation were aware of the declining trend of classical glove puppetry. And it was during the 1980s, when the social climate gradually opened up around the lifting of martial law, that they created this grassroots organization with the aim of reviving local culture and preserving traditional Taiwanese glove puppetry.
The three founders, as academics, made a public call to action and invited well-known puppeteers like Xu Wang multiple times to give lectures at the university. This shifted the idea that glove puppetry was not perceived as high art, sparking a trend of social concern for traditional arts among the general public. For the past 30 years, Seden has devoted itself to preserving the increasingly declining culture of traditional glove puppetry by acquiring and maintaining old puppets, compiling oral scripts of plays from veteran performers, hosting seminars on front and back stage production, and assist in forming puppet theater troupes in schools. Due to limitations in preserving well the artifacts, relics, and collection and considering the social benefits of publicizing cultural assets, in 2020, Chen Rongxiang decided to donate thousands of cultural artifacts from the foundation to his alma mater National Chiao Tung University (now National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University, NYCU). Thus commenced the Seden Foundation Glove Puppetry Collection Research and Development Project.
After three years of implementation, the project has gradually started to restore and digitalize this valuable collection of physical relics and historical documents used for glove puppetry research. NYCU is known for science, engineering, and medical research, though these areas may seem unrelated to glove puppetry and traditional performing arts, but from another standpoint, the university's expertise in information engineering and biomedical fields actually provides an excellent opportunity for interdisciplinary development. In the future, the project will begin with developing cross-disciplinary application between the digital collection and technology, and extend to educating and promoting it among teachers and students within the university. Gradually, it can extend outside of the campus and into schools, communities, and temples in rural areas. This not only preserves classical glove puppetry in a passive sense, but also enables it to be presented through tours by various puppetry troupes, including the university's own glove puppetry troupe, creating a new interpretation for traditional arts with contemporary significance. Ultimately allowing these cultural assets to thrive and live on in a more expansive, diverse community and environment.