Colette Fu

Colette Fu, A Day in the Terraced Rice Fields installation view, 2025.

April 1 - November 26, 2025

A Day in the Terraced Rice Fields

Drawing inspiration from A Day in the Zoo, a reproduction of a Victorian pop-up book published between 1890 and 1900, artist Colette Fu has created a site-specific installation for the Berman Museum entitled A Day in the Terraced Rice Fields, a human-scaled pop-up book highlighting the Red Yao women of Huangluo Village in Guangxi Province, China.

Huangluo is located approximately one kilometer south of Longji, known for its “Dragon’s Backbone” terraced rice fields. The Red Yao women cut their hair only once in their lives as part of a coming-of-age ceremony when they reach marriageable age. Once the hair is cut, it is added as an extension to their natural hair, which can grow up to seven feet long. Since grooms are meant to be the first to see their future wives’ uncovered hair, unmarried women wrap their heads in black cloth. Women’s hair is believed to embody their spirits, and long hair is thought to bring longevity, wealth, and good fortune.

Fu visited the Longji rice terraces in 2014. For a small fee, women will take down their hair and pose for photos with tourists. While tourism helps support the village, it has also led to compromises in their cultural traditions. Across China, Fu observed minority groups on display, such as at the Minority Park in Yunnan Province, where young men and women from various villages live on public view.

A Day in the Zoo references human zoos, or so-called ethnological expositions of the 19th and 20th centuries from the Paris Colonial Exposition, St. Louis World’s Fair, The Igorot Village, Bronx Zoo, and the Brussels World’s Fair. A Day in the Terraced Rice Fields, measuring about 600% the size of the original A Day in the Zoo book (9x12 inches), brings fresh perspective to concepts of exploitative tourism, cultural preservation, and the economic impact of globalization on rural communities in China.

Fu has collaborated with Arin Captis, Amanda De Souza, Lucy Fabiszewski, Sam Mairone, Ash Twomey, and Katarina Yu, Ursinus College students in the Museum Studies Practicum.

About the artist

Colette Fu is a Philadelphia-based artist who received her MFA in Fine Art Photography from the Rochester Institute of Technology in 2003, and soon after, began devising complex compositions that incorporate photography and pop-up paper engineering. Her pop-up books are housed in esteemed institutions such as the National Museum of Women in the Arts, the Library of Congress, the Getty Research Institute, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and many private and rare archive collections. In 2014, Fu participated in a 6-month artist residency at the Swatch Art Peace Hotel in Shanghai, where she continued her “We Are Tiger Dragon” project, an extensive visual exploration of China’s ethnic minorities. While there, she also designed China’s largest pop-up book, which measures 2.5 x 5 x 1.7 meters. In October 2017, Colette created the world’s largest pop-up book, Tao Hua Yuan Ji, which measures 13.8 x 21 feet, which people could enter at the TILT Institute for the Contemporary Image.

Fu’s accolades include a 2024 Philadelphia Cultural Treasures Grant, a 2023 Artworks Grant, a 2020 Joan Mitchell Painter’s & Sculptors Grant, and the 2018 Meggendorfer Prize for best paper-engineered artist book. Additionally, she was honored with a 2008 Fulbright Research Fellowship to China and received grants from various foundations and organizations such as the Independence Foundation, the Leeway Foundation, En Foco, Red Bull, Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, Puffin Foundation and the Society for Photographic Education. She has participated in fully funded artist residencies, including those at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, Swatch Art Peace Hotel, Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, 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. Fu had solo exhibitions at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Asian Arts Initiative, Taubman Museum, Bainbridge Island Museum of Art, Philadelphia Athenaeum, Philips Museum, and many university art galleries.

As a devoted educator, Fu conducts artmaking classes to amplify community voices through pop-up paper-engineered projects. She leads pop-up courses and community workshops internationally.