Pop-up photography? 3-D pop-up? It’s tricky coming up with one label to describe the works of art that Colette Fu creates—maybe because so few people do what she does.

Fu uses her photographs and self-taught paper-engineering skills to design, build, and bring to life elaborate pop-up books of minority cultures in southwest China.

Fu, who is of Chinese descent, grew up in New Jersey. She did not know much about her Chinese ancestry until the 1990s, when she spent three years in China’s Yunnan Province teaching English. She loved the culture and was intrigued by the many different minority groups in the region—there are 25 in southwest China alone. Inspired to share the richness of these little-known cultures with