Exhibition dates: March 3–April 19, 2026

Public Events: March 19
Artist's Lecture: 4:30 PM, LPAC Cinema
List Gallery Reception follows: 5:30-7:00 PM

The List Gallery is pleased to celebrate the mixed-media works of Colette Fu, a Philadelphia-based artist who explores her Nuosu Yi ancestry and the cultural traditions of diverse ethnic minority groups (xiaoshu minzhu 小數民族) in China, including the Miao,Yi, Mongolians, and Tibetans. Her large-scale, richly nuanced paper constructions distill her photographic and ethnographic research and reflect her gift for digital collage, experimentation, and innovation. Paper Journeys: Pop-up Books and Constructions by Colette Fu, will be on view March 3 – April 19, 2026. The artist will give a talk about her work on Thursday, March 19 at 4:30 PM in the Lang Performing Arts Center Cinema; an opening reception will follow in the List Gallery from 5:30 to 7:00 PM.

Paper Journeys will feature varied bodies of works completed between 2014 and the present, including Luoma, Yi Tiger Festival and other works from the We Are Tiger Dragon People, a series of pop-up books she began in 2008 to showcase the diversity of ethnic minority communities in Yunnan and Sichuan provinces in southwestern China. The books feature distinctive cultural traditions, including annual festivals, dance, religious practices, textile patterns, and narrative traditions.  

Several other works on display reflect Fu’s critical inquiry into historical social practices that have aestheticized and exoticized Chinese women. Her artist book, Golden Lotus, focuses on the practice of footbinding and her large-scale work, Unprecedented Novelty, calls attention to the treatment of Afong Moy, the first known Chinese woman immigrant to the United States. She came to Philadelphia in 1834, performing as a traveling exhibit called "The Chinese Lady,” in which she was marketed as a curiosity.

Fu’s exhibition will also include six works from her Zodiac series reflecting her ongoing investigation of Chinese culture and identity in Philadelphia, where she teaches art and creates collaborative artworks in dialogue with underserved groups and other communities.

Fu was born in Princeton, New Jersey, and is the American daughter of Chinese immigrants. She received a B.A. from the University of Virginia and went on to earn an M.F.A. from the Rochester Institute of Technology in 2003. Her work has been collected by distinguished institutions, including the National Museum of Women in the Arts, the Library of Congress, the Getty Research Institute, the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Fu’s work has been supported by numerous awards and grants, including a Forman Arts Initiative Art Works grant, Philadelphia Cultural Treasures grant, Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Fellowship, the Meggendorfer Prize, Leeway Transformation Award, and a Fulbright Research Fellowship to China. In 2024, with support from Monument Lab, Philadelphia, she created Noodle Mountain, a 10-foot-wide pop-up book, which was displayed at Grounds for Sculpture. Recently, Fu also completed a residency at the Berman Museum, Ursinus College, where she created 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.

Paper Journeys was co-curated by Andrea Packard, director of the Swarthmore College Art Collection and Curator of the List Gallery, and Dr. Susan Eberhard, Visiting Assistant Professor of Art History, in conjunction with the concurrent exhibition, Views of Travel, Reverie, and Repose: Selected East Asian Works from the Swarthmore College Art Collection. Funding was provided by the Art History Program’s Lee Frank fund, William J. Cooper Foundation, the Ann Trimble Warren ’38 Exhibition Endowment, and the Intercultural Center, Swarthmore College.