Colette and Nori in 2025.
Colette Fu is a Philadelphia-based artist and paper engineer who creates photo-based pop-up books and large-scale installations that explore identity, cultural history, and community. Combining photography with intricate paper engineering, she transforms personal and collective histories into immersive, dimensional experiences.
Fu received her MFA in Fine Art Photography from the Rochester Institute of Technology in 2003 and soon after began devising complex compositions that merge photography and pop-up paper engineering. After living and teaching in China’s Yunnan Province, she discovered that her mother is a member of the Nuosu Yi, one of China’s officially recognized ethnic minority groups. This discovery led to years of travel and research throughout China and a 2008 Fulbright Research Fellowship to create a photographic pop-up book about the country’s ethnic minority communities.
In 2014, Fu participated in a six-month residency at the Swatch Art Peace Hotel in Shanghai, where she expanded We Are Tiger Dragon People series, her extensive visual exploration of China’s ethnic minority communities, beyond Yunnan Province. While there, she designed a monumental pop-up book, I Love Shanghai, measuring 2.5 × 5 × 1.7 meters. In 2017, she created Tao Hua Yuan Ji, a 13.8 × 21-foot walk-in pop-up book presented at TILT Institute for the Contemporary Image.
Fu’s work is held in numerous public and private collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Library of Congress, the Getty Research Institute, the National Museum of Women in the Arts, and the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, as well as many university, museum, and rare book collections.
Her awards and fellowships include a 2024 Philadelphia Cultural Treasures Grant, a 2023 Forman Arts Initiative Artworks Grant, a 2020 Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant, the 2018 Meggendorfer Prize for best paper-engineered artist book, and a 2008 Fulbright Research Fellowship to China. She has also received support from institutions including the Independence Foundation, Leeway Foundation, En Foco, Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, Puffin Foundation, and the Society for Photographic Education.
Fu has participated in artist residencies at the Swatch Art Peace Hotel, Yaddo, MacDowell, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Sacatar, the Vermont Studio Center, the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Visual Studies Workshop, the Millay Colony, and the Alden B. Dow Center for Creativity. Her work has been presented in solo exhibitions at institutions including the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Asian Arts Initiative, Taubman Museum of Art, Bainbridge Island Museum of Art, the Athenaeum of Philadelphia, and numerous university galleries.
As a devoted educator, Fu teaches pop-up paper engineering internationally and leads community-based artmaking projects that use the pop-up form to amplify individual and collective voices. Her workshops invite participants to explore how paper engineering, photography, and storytelling can bring personal histories and ideas to life.
Her recent work expands these interests into Chinese American history, immigration, and community. Iron and Paper: Unfolding Philadelphia’s Chinatown is a large-scale, mechanically operated pop-up book that explores the layered history, struggles, and resilience of Philadelphia’s Chinatown.
”She simply has a way with people, says her friend and artist Sally Blakemore. ‘Colette’s manner of speaking is very subtle and almost shy, but her personality is huge. She doesn’t want to take center stage. Instead, she lets her work speak for itself.” Sally Blakemore, American Craft, July 2015
“Much as her books come to life when they open up, revealing magic and wonder inside, Fu has emerged as a unique and passionate artist by consistently venturing out of her comfort zone. Happy to blend in, she shines reaching out.” Joyce Lovelace, American Craft, July 2015.
I was born in Princeton, New Jersey, where my father worked as an engineer at Ingersoll Rand, and raised in North Brunswick. Growing up, I struggled with my Chinese identity. I often felt embarrassed by my heritage and wanted to distance myself from it. After college, I traveled to Yunnan Province in southwest China, where my mother was born, to teach English. Known as the “South of the Clouds,” Yunnan is one of China’s most culturally diverse regions, home to 25 of the country’s 55 officially recognized ethnic minority groups.
While teaching at Yunnan Nationalities University, I discovered that my great-grandfather had helped establish the university and was a member of the Black Nuosu Yi, as well as a governor and general of Yunnan during the transitional years surrounding World War II. I stayed in Yunnan for three years, an experience that reshaped my understanding of my heritage and ultimately led me to pursue a life as an artist.
In 2008, supported by a Fulbright fellowship, I returned to Yunnan to photograph its ethnic minority communities and began transforming these images into pop-up books. My work is both a personal journey toward my own ancestry and a portrait of cultures often overlooked or misunderstood. We are not a monolith.
While traveling through the mountainous Yi landscape, an elderly Yi man told me, “Although an eagle flies far into the distance, its wings will fold back. For the Yi, the ultimate goal of life is to find the path of your ancestors.”
Through photography and paper engineering, I create sculptural pop-up books that collapse boundaries—between cultures, between viewer and object, and among photography, book art, installation, craft, and sculpture. By transforming photographs into dimensional, interactive objects, I invite viewers to physically engage with the histories and stories I seek to understand.