Alfonse Chiu is a writer, designer, artist, and curator. Their practice interrogates imaginaries of capital and ideologies as shaped by media infrastructures and networked economies, so as to contemplate possible futures for bodies, societies, and the environment. Their present research revolves around a critical reading of the tropical belt as a geo-economic imaginary and (neo)colonial hinterland through a situated analysis of plantation capital and infrastructure in South/East Asia.
They were the Fall 2021 e-flux journal fellow, the 2021 DECK Associate Curator, and a winner of the Young Climate Prize 2023, organised by The World Around. They are presently a master's candidate in Environmental Design at the Yale School of Architecture.
They are the director of the Centre for Urban Mythologies (CUM), a critical research space investigating space, capitalism, and the Anthropocene positioned from the Global South; the programme director of SeaShorts, a Malaysia-based pan-Southeast Asian platform for short-form moving image culture; and 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.
Their texts have been published internationally in periodicals such as Hyperallergic, PIN-UP, ArtAsiaPacific, and ArtReview; and commissioned by institutions such as the Asian Film Archive, Tbilisi Architecture Biennial, Sharjah Architecture Triennial, and Nieuwe Instituut. They have participated in residencies at Medialab Matadero (Madrid), PACT Zollverein (Essen), and Muzej Suvremene Umjetnosti (Zagreb), amongst others.
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.
-
CV available on request. Vocational—though not, thankfully, moral—loyalities and skills can be made accessible based on mutually agreed-upon compensation of a financial nature. Please hire me.
“Idle people are often bored and bored people, unless they sleep a lot, are cruel. It is not accident that boredom and cruelty are great preoccupations in our time.”