Colette Fu

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Colette Fu
Colette Fu at the Axi Fire Festival, 2015
Born
Princeton, New Jersey
Education
  • Rochester Institute of Technology
  • Virginia Commonwealth University
  • Yunnan Nationalities University
  • University of Virginia
OccupationsBook artist, paper engineer, artist, photographer, teacher
MotherPearl Fu
AwardsFulbright Scholarship, Leeway Transformation Award, En Foco New Award, Puffin Foundation Artist Grant, Society of Photographic Education Achievement Scholarship, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Artist Fellowship
Websitecolettefu.com
For Our Ancestors at the Center for Emerging Visual Artists[1]
Noodle Mountain at Grounds for Sculpture

Alex, from Good Day Philadelphia, visits Tao Hua Yuan Ji[2]

Colette Fu is an American photographer, book artist and paper engineer known for creating pop-up books, especially on a large scale, from her photographs.[3]

Early life and education

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Fu, born in Princeton, New Jersey, is the daughter of mainland Chinese immigrants. After graduating from the University of Virginia, Fu traveled to China with a student tour and shortly returned for three years to teach English and, later, to study Mandarin and art in Yunnan Province. Fu traveled throughout Yunnan, where her mother, member of the Nuosu Yi community, was born, photographing various people in ethnic dress.[4] After returning to the United States, Fu studied photography at Virginia Commonwealth University and Rochester Institute of Technology, where she began collaging images into detailed hyperreal fantasy scenarios.[4]

Career

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She teaches pop-up courses and community workshops at art centers, universities and institutions internationally.[5] Her large-scale, three-dimensional pop-up books feature photographic images which extend towards the viewer for many layers. During an artist residency in Shanghai, Fu designed China's largest pop-up book.[6]

Pop-up and flap books originally illustrated sociological ideas and scientific principles; she constructs her own books on how our selves relate to society today. In 2008, Fu was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to create a pop-up book of the 25 ethnic minority groups residing in Yunnan Province, China, from where the artist's mother's family descends. 25 of 55 minority tribes of China reside in Yunnan and comprise less than 9% of the nation's population, with the Han representing the majority. She uses her artistic skills to spread knowledge and provide a brief portrait of their existence.[7][8][9][10]

Fu's well-received pop-up book series include:

  • Haunted Philadelphia explores the psychology of fear and spookiness in locations around the city, such as Fort Mifflin, Rodin Museum, Academy of Music and the Philadelphia State Hospital at Byberry.
  • We Are Tiger Dragon People, started in 2008, is a series of pop-up books showcasing the diversity of ethnic minority communities in Yunnan Province in southwestern China. The books feature aspects of the local culture: festivals, clothing, dance, folklore, deities, and people.[4]
  • Tao Hua Yuan Ji,[3] created at the Philadelphia Photo Arts Center, is the World's Largest Photo Book measuring 13.8 x 21 feet, and 5 feet high. People could enter into the pop-up book.
  • Noodle Mountain at Grounds for Sculpture.

Fu's commercial clients for paper engineering have included LVMH, Vogue China, Canon Asia, Greenpeace and Children's Medical Center in Texas.[11]

Fu's books are in collections including Library of Congress, Getty Research Institute, Yale University, Metropolitan Museum of Art and National Museum of Women in the Arts.[8]

Technique

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On a visit to her local Borders Book Store, Fu stumbled onto Robert Sabuda's Wizard of Oz pop-up book and was instantly enamored.[6] Fu then learned paper engineering mechanics by reverse engineering pop-up books purchased on eBay while attending numerous artist residencies.[12][13]

Each of Fu's pop-up books are a single, large format spread. A good variety of her pop-up books are based on her experiences traveling to China and learning about her culture. Fu creates a digital collage using her own photographs on her computer, then "works on the pop-up mechanisms that cause her composition to explode from the page."[14] Fu does all the work herself, including printing and binding, and each pop-up element is cut by hand. Some books include up to 40 photographs and measure 3 x 4.5 feet.[6] An average pop-up can take up to four weeks to design and build.[15]

Tao Hua Yuan Ji at the Taubman Museum, Roanoke, VA[16]
Yi Costume Festival

Extended study of Chinese minorities

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Colette Fu's projects have taken her across the globe and can take years to fully materialize. With the help of a Fulbright fellowship, a recent endeavor found her in southwest Yunnan Province, China, where she studied the local population, learned about their culture and immersed herself in the daily life of its people. The project took ten years to complete, but resulted in some of Fu's most notable work.[17][18]

Exhibitions

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Year Title Location
2023 Wishing Tree[19] Bainbridge Island Museum of Art, Bainbridge Island, WA
2022 Medium & Message: The Book Art of Colette Fu and Lothar Meggendorfer[20] The Rosenbach, Philadelphia, PA
2021 What the Butterfly Dragon Taught Me: Dimensional Stories in Paper[21] Center for Book Arts, NYC
2019 We are Tiger Dragon People[16] Taubman Museum of Art, Roanoke, VA
2018 We are Tiger Dragon People Phillips Museum of Art at Franklin and Marshall College[22]
2017 Tao Hua Yuan Ji: Source of the Peach Blossoms Philadelphia Photo Arts Center[2]
2016 Wanderer/Wonderer: The Pop-up Books of Colette Fu The National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC,
catalog included[23]
2015 Land of Deities [24] Georgetown University, Washington, DC
2013 We are Tiger Dragon People & Photo Binge[25] Jaffe Center for Book Arts, Boca Raton, FL
2011 Haunted Philadelphia[26] Philadelphia Athenaeum, Philadelphia, PA

Awards

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Book contributions

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  • Making Books with Kids: 25 Paper Projects to Fold, Sew, Paste, Pop, and Draw[39] by Esther K. Smith, 2016. Fu's Spinning Flower Pop-Up, page 83.
  • Playing with Pop-Ups: The Art of Dimensional, Moving Paper Designs[40] by Helen Hiebert, 2014. Fu's pattern for a pop-up version of Philadelphia's First Bank of the United States is on pages 60–63.

References

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  • Error creating thumbnail: File missing Media related to Lua error in Module:Commons_link at line 62: attempt to index field 'wikibase' (a nil value). at Wikimedia Commons
  • To Be Seen on American Craft
  • Colette Fu at Springboard
  • Articulate with Jim Cotter Archived December 20, 2016, at the Wayback Machine
  • Asian Art Revives Connection to a Culture Behind

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