Alfonse Chiu is a writer, curator, and designer based between Taipei, Singapore, and Shanghai.

Working across contemporary art, architecture, performance, and cinema, Chiu's research-based practice seeks to excavate the subterranean processes and infrastructures underpinning capital and ideological flows within the post-colonial tropical belt, with a focus on South/East Asia and the Pacific Rim. Through exhibitions, publications, and performances, Chiu identifies how regimes of power and knowledge manifest through the production and circulation of visual, material, and spatial cultures to structure social definitions of value, property, and desire.

They are the founder and director of the Centre for Urban Mythologies (CUM), a para-institution and research studio for critical spatial and curatorial practice based in and around the Global South. Between 2023–25, they were the Curator of PTT Space, a Taipei-based contemporary art gallery focusing on emerging practices from the expanded East Asia and diasporas. Presently, they serve as the Editor of the Rockbund Art Museum in Shanghai.

Previously, they were the fall 2021 e-flux journal fellow; the 2021 DECK Associate Curator; a cohort laureate of the inaugural Young Climate Prize 2023, organised by The World Around; a 2024–25 co-finalist of the Canadian Centre for Architecture Emerging Curator Residency Program (with Lim Sheau Yun); a 2024 Yale Tropical Resources Institute fellow; and a 2025 European architecture platform LINA fellow (with Emma Kaufmann LaDuc).

They have presented curatorial projects at Khoj (New Delhi), Yale School of Art (New Haven), Tainan Art Museum (Tainan), Loop Festival (Barcelona), Swab (Barcelona), Esplanade – Theatres on the Bay (Singapore), DECK (Singapore), Fotoaura Institute of Photography (Tainan), amongst others; and have participated in residencies at Medialab Matadero (Madrid), PACT Zollverein (Essen), Muzej Suvremene Umjetnosti (Zagreb), and the Trienal de Arquitectura de Lisboa (Lisbon).

Their texts have been published internationally in periodicals such as Hyperallergic, ArtAsiaPacific, Ocula, and ArtReview; and commissioned by major institutions including the Asian Film Archive, Arsenal Filminstitut, Tbilisi Architecture Biennial, Sharjah Architecture Triennial, Nieuwe Instituut, Nasher Sculpture Center, the West Kowloon Cultural District Authority, the Singapore Pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale, and the Philippine Pavilion at the 61st Venice Biennale.

They are currently working on two manuscript projects based on their graduate thesis at the Yale School of Architecture: the first examines how extractive industries and corporate finance co-constituted each other in and across British Malaya between the 19th and 20th century through the social and environmental histories of Pulau Carey, a centuries-old plantation island in western Malaysia that is also the site of an ongoing billion-dollar megaport project; the second identifies a collective spatial history of property, desire, and accumulation across the Anglo-Tropics, centred in colonial Southeast Asia, that traces land reform, racial identification, and corporate conglomeration as politico-economic technologies of alienation and appropriation.

They are the convener of the Tropical Studies Working Group, located at and supported by the Yale Whitney Humanities Center; they previously served as the Albert Sack Graduate Curatorial Intern of American Decorative Arts at the Yale University Art Gallery where they assisted on curatorial research and archive management at the Sack Family Archive of the Leslie P. and George H. Hume American Furniture Study Center.

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

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