Chinese Name: 徐炳垣
Born: 1935
Died: 2022
Place of Birth: Changhua County (Central Taiwan)
Did You Know?
Hsu Bing-yuan, carver of the heads of puppets for po-te-hi puppet theater, not only had superb carving skills, but also constantly brought forth new ideas and improved puppets in order to keep up with the evolution of the art form and its performance. His most famous innovation was designing puppet heads with movable mouths, eyes, and ears, enabling the puppets to show more detailed expressions and taking Taiwanese puppet-making technique to a new level. He also applied this dexterous design to the puppet for Shi Yanwen (史艷文) in the 1970 TV puppet show "Scholar Swordsman Shi Yanwen (雲州大儒俠史艷文)," which managed to score a whopping audience rating of 97% upon its premiere.
Taiwanese po-te-hi puppet theater was introduced from Zhangzhou and Quanzhou in Fujian, China. In the earliest days, the puppets were mostly brought to Taiwan by the performers, and troupes had to order new puppets from China. In these traditional puppet shows, the head is essentially the soul of the puppet. Importing new puppets became challenging after World War II broke out, and so Hsu's father Hsu Hsi-sheng (徐析森), who came from a family of statue sculptors, was entrusted with copying the heads of puppets from Quanzhou. With the ingenious technique practiced by his family and the use of bright paint to overcome the original puppet heads' tendency to easily lose their paint jobs, the traditional puppets made in Taiwan gradually became famous and developed a heritage of their own. Growing up in a family of carvers and sculptors, Hsu Bing-yuan, at the age of 16, formally entered an apprenticeship under his father and alongside his brothers, learning to carve puppets, paint their faces, and make their beards and hair.
After po-te-hi was introduced to Taiwan, the puppets evolved many times in response to social changes and different performance methods. Over the years, traditional po-te-hi has evolved and grown in Taiwan, moving on to television and even movie screens, and today, it has a markedly different style from its Chinese counterpart. Hsu Bing-yuan’s puppet production process included helping his father carve puppets for a cinematic adaptation of "Journey to the West (西遊記)" in 1958, making puppets that were about 100 cm tall for puppet show master Toshio Huang (黃俊雄) in 1963, and working with his father to design puppets with moving eyes and mouths for puppet shows broadcast on Taiwan Television in 1966. This accumulated experience in making puppets laid the foundation for Hsu to design a more dynamic puppet with lifelike eyes and mouth for the series “Scholar Swordsman Shi Yanwen,” a show which became a massive sensation across Taiwan.
In addition to relying on the performer's evocative speech and skillful puppetry, the puppets themselves are also a very important part of po-te-hi performance, essential to playing out the fascinating drama plots, shaping distinctive characters, and conveying the thoughts and feelings of the characters. Hsu Bing-yuan’s puppets are characterized by realism and mimicry, and he always strived to imbue them with vitality and a unique personality, which made them deeply loved by troupes. Hsu Bing-yuan founded the Chiao Cheng Chen Puppet Studio (巧成真木偶之家) in the 1970s, and the excellent quality of the puppets they produced saw many well-known performers such as Chung Jen-pi (鍾任壁), Xu Wang (許王), and Hung Lian-sheng (洪連生) place orders with him. Even the headline characters of the Pili puppet series, Yeh Hsiao Chai (葉小釵) and Luanshi Kuangdao (亂世狂刀), were made by Hsu himself.
Hsu began learning to carve at the age of 16, and carved tens of thousands of puppets over the following 70 years. His pursuit of puppet carving was always defined by excellence, and he consistently aimed to pass on this traditional art with a spirit of professionalism. At the same time, he also embodied a pioneering and original spirit. With the development of po-te-hi, he spurred the puppet carving industry to new levels, promoting a more diverse puppet art and leaving a wonderful mark on Taiwan’s traditional crafts. In 2016, Hsu Bing-yuan was named by the Changhua County Government as an important preserver of the traditional craft of puppet production. That same year, he handed over the reins of the family company to his son, Hsu Shih-ho (徐世河). When Hsu passed in 2022, he was posthumously awarded a Presidential Citation by the Ministry of Culture and Changhua County Government in recognition of his contribution to traditional Taiwanese puppetry.