30th Dec – Angie Chua and I had been working on making these simple chinese puppets inspired by Chinese Folk Tale – Journey to the West. These puppets are installed in Little Skool House (Pasir Ris E!Hub Downtown East Outlet) for one month before we will change to the next theme. The puppets will be seen and discussed during class for the pre-schoolers.
My love for puppets came when I was studying Indonesian Gamelan music back in 2001. We would travel to Indonesia and saw in action, how puppets are being handled to tell a story and how the music (which I was learning at that time) would accompany the puppets. The puppets were of significance to the audiences as the characters reflect a similar personality to the human world. Typical Indonesian puppet show tells the story or Rama & Sita (Ramayana) or from the long epic poetry of the Mahabharata.
I was especially fond of how the puppets were made using Buffalo hide and Buffalo Horns as the stick handle. I was also fond of how customised carving tools were used to chip off the thick dry buffalo hide with a hammer. Then using glazes of gold and various bright paints, colours are painting onto the puppet and left to dry.
Here, in our simplistic Chinese Puppets for Chinese New Year, we recreate the story of ‘Journey to the West’ a popular taoist/buddhist legend of the famous Tang Sanzang (monk) and his fellow companions, Su WuKong, Zhu Bajie and Sun Wujing.
For a more detailed writing of the story, please refer to this link:
Stories from the Community 