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