Alice, Nien-pu, Ko

Alice Nien-pu Ko is a curator and writer based in New York, working across contemporary art, moving image, and transnational art histories. Her research-led, site-responsive practice investigates cultural memory, perception, and the unseen—foregrounding spectral media, Indigenous epistemologies, and expanded cinematic forms as tools to navigate history, embodiment, and speculative futures.​

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Since 2013, Ko has led and co-curated exhibitions and public programs at museums, biennials, and independent platforms across Asia, Europe, and North America. At the Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts, where she co-curated exhibitions such as Tony Oursler: Black Box (2021), the Pan-Austro-Nesian Arts Festival (2021), and SUNSHOWER: Contemporary Art from Southeast Asia 1980s to Now (2019), a landmark regional survey co-presented with Mori Art Museum. Her solo curatorial exhibition Tomb of the Soul, Temple, Machine and the Self (2018) was nominated for the 17th Taishin Arts Award, and presented in parallel with Twentieth-Century Nudes from Tate.

Her recent New York exhibitions include Between Waves (The Brooklyn Rail, 2023–24) and A Dweller on Two Planets (Microscope Gallery, 2023), which explore oceanic worldviews, deep time, and speculative media through moving image and sound. She has participated in international residencies including the International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP) in New York and Tokyo Arts and Space, and collaborated with institutions such as the Hong Kong Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture and the National Culture and Arts Foundation.

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​Ko contributes to regional and international discourses on memory, media, and decolonial aesthetics through curatorial research, writing, and editorial work. She has presented her research at the International Convention of Asia Scholars and the Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Conference, and her writing has engaged artists such as Shigeko Kubota, Tony Oursler, Rashid Johnson, Angel Otero, Chen Chieh-jen, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Ho Tzu Nyen, and Jane Jin Kaisen. She is the editor of Tony Oursler: Black Box, Comparisons and Intersections of Art Histories in Southeast Asia, and Surviving on Time: Curatorial Report from Asia—publications that map cross-cultural dialogues in contemporary and experimental art practices.

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Ko’s curatorial approach positions contemporary art as a generative site for world-making, where archives, landscapes, and ritual converge to shape alternate histories and speculative futures. Through exhibitions, writing, and transregional collaborations, she develops frameworks that interweave intellectual inquiry, affective resonance, and aesthetic experimentation—offering spaces for reflection, cultural mediation, and imaginative repair.