Alfonse Chiu

Alfonse Chiu is an architectural historian, designer, and curator. Working through the modalities of exhibition, publication, public programme, and performance, Chiu’s research-based practice seeks to identify how systems 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 across the Anglotropics and the Pacific Rim, with a focus on East and Southeast Asia.

Chiu was the Fall 2021 e-flux journal fellow, a cohort laureate of the inaugural Young Climate Prize in 2023, and a 2025 LINA European architecture platform fellow. Their texts have been commissioned widely by institutions including the Asian Film Archive, Arsenal Filminstitut, Tbilisi Architecture Biennial, Sharjah Architecture Triennial, Nieuwe Instituut, the Yale Schools of Art and Architecture, Nasher Sculpture Center, and the Singapore and Philippines Pavilions at the 59th and 61st Venice Biennales, respectively.

Chiu holds a Master of Environmental Design from the Yale School of Architecture, where they also convene the Tropical Studies Working Group, supported by Yale Whitney Humanities Center. Chiu is presently the Editor of the Rockbund Art Museum in Shanghai, and also directs the Centre for Urban Mythologies (CUM), a research studio and para-institutional platform for critical spatial and curatorial practice.