Alfonse chiu. photographed by benjamin piascik. image courtesy yale school of architecture 2

Alfonse Chiu

M.E.D. Student

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 thesis project 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, and curator focusing on Asia and the Pacific Rim. They are the founder 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 platform for short-form moving image cultures from Southeast Asia; and the curator of PTT Space, a contemporary art gallery based in Taipei. Their texts have been commissioned by major institutions such as the Asian Film Archive, Berlinale, Sharjah Architecture Triennial, Nieuwe Instituut, and the Nasher Sculpture Center; and published in periodicals including ArtReview, ArtAsiaPacific, Ocula, and Hyperallergic. They were the Fall 2021 e-flux journal fellow, the 2021/22 DECK Associate Curator, and a youth laureate of the Young Climate Prize 2023, organized by The World Around.

Together with Emma Kaufmann LaDuc, Chiu is 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.

Research Area Keywords

extractivism, agro-capital, path dependency, intimacy, tropicality, world system, Southeast Asia