Alfonse Chiu

Alfonse Chiu is a writer, designer, curator, and founding director of the Centre for Urban Mythologies (CUM). Spanning 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 postcolonial tropical belt, with a focus on South and East Asia and the Pacific Rim.

Chiu was the Fall 2021 e-flux journal fellow, a cohort laureate of the inaugural Young Climate Prize in 2023, organized by the World Around, and a 2025 LINA European architecture platform fellow. Their texts have been published internationally in periodicals such as Hyperallergic, PIN-UP, ArtAsiaPacific, and ArtReview; and commissioned by institutions including the Asian Film Archive, Sharjah Architecture Triennial, Nieuwe Instituut, the Yale schools of art and architecture, Nasher Sculpture Center, and the Singapore and Philippines pavilions at the fifty-ninth and sixty-first 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’s Whitney Humanities Center. Chiu is presently the editor of the Rockbund Art Museum in Shanghai.