Alfonse Chiu studies the historical formation of space, race, and capital in the tropical belt, with a particular focus on the relationship between corporate management and financial speculation under imperial and colonial regimes.

Centered around an investigation of how extractive industries and corporate finance co-constituted each other in and through British Malaya between the 19th and early 20th century, Chiu's present thesis project at the Yale School of Architecture seeks to identify a spatial history of property, desire, and capital accumulation in colonial Southeast Asia, particularly through tracing a cosmopolitan genealogy of technologies enabling the abstraction and transaction of bodies and/as commodities.

Drawing on their interests in how visual, material, and spatial cultures reflect and refract ideological systems, they are the convener of the Tropical Studies Working Group, supported by the Whitney Humanities Center, and the Albert Sack Graduate Curatorial Intern of American Decorative Arts at the Yale University Art Gallery.

In addition to their academic research, Chiu is also a writer, designer, artist, and curator focusing on practices from Asia and the Pacific Rim. They are the founder and director of the Centre for Urban Mythologies (CUM), a critical research and curatorial studio exploring the tropes and narratives of the urban condition within/through the Global South; the programme director of SeaShorts, an itinerant Malaysia-based platform for short-form moving image cultures from Southeast Asia; an associate curator with Cinemovement, an artist-run initiative fermenting new collaborations between performance and time-based media by artists, dancers, and filmmakers in Asia; and the curator of PTT Space, a contemporary art gallery based in Taipei.

Their texts have been published internationally in periodicals such as Hyperallergic, PIN-UP,  ArtAsiaPacific, and ArtReview; and commissioned by major institutions including the Asian Film Archive, Berlinale, Tbilisi Architecture Biennial, Sharjah Architecture Triennial, Nieuwe Instituut, and the Nasher Sculpture Center. They have participated in residencies at Medialab Matadero (Madrid), PACT Zollverein (Essen), and Muzej Suvremene Umjetnosti (Zagreb), amongst others.

They were the Fall 2021 e-flux journal fellow, the 2021 DECK Associate Curator,  and a laureate of the Young Climate Prize 2023, organised by The World Around.

Together with Emma Kaufmann LaDuc, Chiu is also a 2025 Fellow of the European architecture platform LINA where they are developing a multi-media editorial project examining the terrestrial and corporeal politics of extraction and exhaustion across the Dinaric Alps, while in residence at the Lisbon Architecture Triennale.

Recent artistic and curatorial projects include Shiy De-Jinn: Intimations (2024, PTT Space at  Art Basel Hong Kong: Insights, Hong Kong); Soft Country (2023, LOOP Festival and Manifesta 15, Barcelona); HOME/LAND: Recent Moving Images from Southeast Asia (2023, SWAB and Zumzeig, Barcelona); SeaShorts: Tanam Padi (2023, Kuala Lumpur); Fruit Atlas (2023 - ongoing, Medialab Matadero, Madrid); TERRITO/REALITIES (2022, DECK, Singapore); and Glossaries for Unwritten Knowledges (2020-2022, Malaysia), a collaborative interdisciplinary project co-presented with Wendi Sia of GERIMIS Art Project that aims to re-center indigenous narratives in contemporary Malaysia.

Their most recent solo exhibition as an artist, This Is What We Believe, was presented by Goethe-Institut Singapur in 2022.

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