Senior Thesis - Jingwei

My topic of choice is a Chinese traditional artform - shadow puppet plays. As a Chinese citizen, I was lucky to be expose to traditional Chinese artforms, but many of them are starting to fade. As technology grows, we are losing much of our traditions. People can watch movies online instead of walking along the street to watch puppet plays. My goal is to teach the younger generation about Chinese shadow puppet plays, in the hopes of increasing their interests in all traditional Chinese artforms, because they are such an important and enjoyable part of our culture.

I’m created a puppet play based on a traditional Chinese story - Jingwei Fill Up the Sea. Instead of showing the play in flat screen, I split the story into three parts, and put these three scenes onto three big lanterns. The audience will come close and the lantern will light up and start to spin. There will be audio put on the side so the audience can listen to the story while they watch the play.