Growing up in Darwin, Australia, Melissa Chiu never imagined her path would lead her to Washington, DC, where she now serves as director of the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.
However, Chiu, who has three sisters (and is one of two sets of fraternal twins), always had a love for art. “My parents encouraged us to all have very different interests,” she reflects.
Chiu leaned into this passion when she moved to Sydney for high school, immersing herself in art history. She went on to earn a bachelor’s degree in art history and criticism at the University of Western Sydney, followed by a master’s in arts administration at the College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales. Later, she completed a Ph.D. at the University of Western Sydney, focusing on Chinese contemporary art in the diaspora. “I realized early on that curatorial work was a way of bringing together art history and a sense of creativity,” says Chiu.
Slated to reopen in 2026, a rendering of the revitalized sculpture garden, designed by architect Hiroshi Sugimoto
She kickstarted her career as an independent curator in Sydney before moving to New York in 2001, where she assumed the role of curator of contemporary Asian and Asian-American art at the Asia Society Museum, becoming its director three years later. (She would go on to serve the museum for 13 years in total.)
Chiu is particularly proud of exhibitions including Yoshitomo Nara: Nobody’s Fool (co-created with associate curator Miwako Tezuka), which examined the Neo Pop artist’s work in connection to music, as well as Art and China’s Revolution (co-curated with Zheng Shengtian) that reflects on art during China’s Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and ’70s. The latter, she notes, “was the first time there had been a focus on art from that time. I was always interested in exhibitions that were first-time shows, either of the material or idea.”
In 2014, Chiu took on her current role as director of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. She drove a record-breaking number of visitors through its doors in part thanks to strategic programming, including the celebrated Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors exhibition in 2017. The Japanese contemporary artist had been showcasing Infinity Mirrors since 1965, but it had hardly been included in the major gallery exhibitions of her work. Chiu wanted to bring it to the forefront.
“The Infinity Mirror rooms were a three-dimensional, all-immersive encapsulation of her preoccupation with the idea of infinity,” Chiu says. “The rooms are something that you step fully into. It was a way of establishing the Infinity Mirror rooms as a practice central to her artwork rather than a footnote.” That year, the Hirshhorn saw its highest annual attendance in nearly three decades, with more than one million visitors.
Pickett’s Charge by artist Mark Bradford spans nearly 400 linear feet
Under Chiu’s leadership, the Hirshhorn continues to forge a path into the future through increased accessibility. The Hirshhorn Eye, for instance, is a free new mobile guide that uses image recognition of an artwork to show videos of artists speaking about their work on a visitor’s smartphone.
The current focal point of the museum’s projects, however, is the revitalization of its Sculpture Garden, which is currently under construction with a design led by artist and architect Hiroshi Sugimoto. When it reopens in 2026, it will expose the Hirshhorn to the National Mall with a wide, welcoming front entrance, along with improved amenities such as additional shade and seating.
Having spent a lifetime in the arts, Chiu still doesn’t feel like what she does is work. “I don’t seek out a balance because I feel fortunate to have the job that I do,” she says. “It’s not to say that it’s all easy, but when you love what you do, you are not looking for ways out.”
The 2017 reimagining of Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Mirror Room: Phalli’s Field, which first debuted in 1965
This article originally appeared in HD’s July 2024 issue.
