To open one of Colette Fu’s books is to awaken wonder at the magic of pop-up paper engineering and imagine what stories lie behind the colorful photographs.
The Getty Research Institute recently acquired four pop-up volumes by the Chinese American artist from her We Are Tiger Dragon People series.
Each book is made out of collaged photographs from Fu’s many trips to Yunnan Province in China. In the 1990s she went on an organized tour of the country after college that led to a discovery of her family history. Her mother is of Nuosu Yi minority culture, and her great-grandfather, Lung Yun, had been the governor of Yunnan and a general in the army. After that trip, Fu moved to China and taught English for three years at Yunnan Institute for Nationalities, the university her grandfather helped found. She photographed her extensive travels and the many people she met.
Fu returned to the United States to formally study photography. She recalls opening pop-up books in a bookstore in Rochester and delighting in The Wizard of Oz and Who Stole the Cookie from the Cookie Jar? Artist residencies helped her perfect the art of pop-up paper engineering. In 2008 Fu received a Fulbright Fellowship to return to Yunnan Province to create new work. Photographs made during that fellowship began her We Are Tiger Dragon People series, and she has gone back over the years to continue the project.
Colette Fu (left) with a local woman in Yunnan Province, China, 1996. Photo courtesy of Colette Fu
I met Fu in 2011 when I was her studio assistant for a workshop she taught at Penland School of Crafts in Mitchell County, North Carolina. Sweeping the floor of all the tiny scraps of paper seemed to be my primary job as students learned the art of paper engineering. We bonded over our love of travel, mutual distaste for snobbery, and work in the restaurant industry. I caught up with Fu in her studio in Philadelphia. The following stories she tells about the four books at the Research Institute are edited from our conversation.
Wa Hair Swinging Dance, from We are Tiger Dragon People series, 2016. Photo courtesy of Colette Fu
Fu on Wa Hair Swinging Dance
During my Fulbright Fellowship in 2008 I traveled to Cangyuan Wa Autonomous County in western Yunnan Province to participate in Monihei (which literally translates as “Rub You Black”) carnival. The Wa view the color black as a symbol of fortune, diligence, and health. During the festival, people spread perfumed mud on each other, the darker the better. They told me the mud brought long life to old people, beauty to young women, and luck to children. Whenever there is a celebration in Kunming of minorities, the Wa women almost always show up doing the hair swinging dance. The Wa live in and near the A Wa Mountains and neighboring rivers. Their hair is so long and healthy.
After analyzing my favorite photos, I realized that using a technique of opposing 90-degree angles would accentuate the rotation and movements of their heads swinging around. While I didn’t know I was going to make a pop-up book of the dance at the time, I had taken enough photos of that particular event so that the heads don’t repeat.
Luoma, Yi Tiger Festival, from We are Tiger Dragon People series, 2020. Photo courtesy of Colette Fu
Fu on Luoma, Yi Tiger Festival
I found out about the Tiger Festival from only one video on YouTube. There was no research on the Internet in English at the time. There’s hardly any on it now. I continue to learn things after I experience them. As times change, there are more publications and research articles available. Hardly anyone knows about it still. I messaged the woman who posted the only video on it at the time, and she responded. She said she was a librarian from Taiwan, retired, and traveling around Yunnan. So I asked if I could go with her. And she said yes.
It was great, because she’s fluent in reading and writing Mandarin. My Mandarin skills are not as good anymore, as I’ve traveled in other regions around the world and had to learn other languages. But I had the family name, and I looked like I blended in with people in that area and understood the dialect. She looked more like a tourist. So the two of us balanced each other out.
The local TV station hired the villagers to do a reenactment during rehearsal before the real festival happened, which was the next day. She got us invited to that, and we were able to attend that rehearsal shoot. That’s why I was able to photograph everything so clearly and up close for the book.
Miao Fishing Contest, from We are Tiger Dragon People series, 2019. Photo courtesy of Colette Fu
Fu on Miao Fishing Contest
I went to an autonomous region for Miao and Dong minority in Guizhou Province, just east of Yunnan Province, while I was an artist in residence in Shanghai in 2014. I invited my friend from Santa Fe, Sally Blakemore, who is also a paper engineer, to go with me because I didn’t want to go by myself for many reasons. Sally agreed. I picked out the itinerary, gave it to a travel agency, and then they found local guides. Sally was, I don’t know, in her late 60s. She had dyed red hair, and she’s really friendly and funny, so everyone paid attention to her, and I could just take pictures. Tour guides always want to talk, and I don’t want to so much, but Sally talked to them, so it was the perfect tour for me. And people often assume I’m a tour guide when I’m with Western-looking friends.
The Miao fishing contest happened during the Sisters’ Rice Festival, which is one of the largest minority celebrations in China. It’s really difficult to get to. In 2008 I used to take a bus and then you had to find a place to sleep. I didn’t want to do all that like before. At one place we even slept in a storage garage with the sunflower seeds, you know? And then they moved us to a slippery dining table at a Yi restaurant. Probably a lot of pork lard from the tuo tuo rou, a popular Yi dish of chunks of pork. Table beds. I actually didn’t mind it so much, but it was a bit too narrow.
Then you’re, like, waiting for the bus and then you have to fight to get on the bus. And then if you don’t really know what’s going on, you might get off at the wrong place. My Chinese wasn't as good anymore. When you’re in the Miao area, it’s a different dialect. So having a local tour guide and an outgoing travel companion really made it so that I could focus on photography and not worry about things so much.
I thought, “Oh, everyone knows about the Sisters’ Rice Festival, but no one knows about the fishing contest!” But, turns out most don’t know about the Sisters’ Rice Festival here either.
Uyghur Food from We are Tiger Dragon People series, 2020. Photo courtesy of Colette Fu
Fu on Uyghur Food
The Uyghur people, who are mostly Muslim, make incredible food. The Xinjiang region where they live is also incredibly beautiful, because you can see the mountains, and the air is so clear. Initially I wanted to make a book about the local bread. There is a chicken feather stamp they traditionally used to punch these patterns.
To do all that work for that one piece of bread is beautiful. But I didn’t think it visually would have been enough content to make a book about bread. So then I opened it up to all these photos that I took of food there.
You see Uyghur men selling raisins all over China. I read that Xinjiang had some of the most famous grapes in the world. No one thinks about China being famous for grapes. So I wanted to go to the Grape Valley, but it is a little hard to get there.
A friend was fluent in the Uyghur dialect, and she got me a taxi, and the taxi took me to this parking lot where local Uyghur businessmen go down to the Grape Valley, which is like a couple of hours away. So I went down with a whole car of Uyghur men, and I found a local to show me around. In the book there are those grapes surrounding the kabob cart. The base of the book shows fabric that I photographed at a museum in Kashgar of a traditional Uyghur tablecloth for a historical reference.
I went to northern Morocco to attend an artist residency and learn metalsmithing in 2017. I asked my teacher to punch some metal to match the kabob cart in the book so that I could incorporate it into the cover. He even designed the chisel to make the patterns. I wanted to show a connection, like while this is Morocco and this is China, there’s still this cultural overlap, you know?
Every little thing in the book has quite a lot of meaning to me, but I don’t necessarily talk about it all the time. People who buy my books don’t know most of these stories.
