Hu Chao is a Singaporean art historian and curator, currently serving as an Associate Research Professor at the Center for New Museum Studies, Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts (GAFA), China. Rooted in both Lingnan (South China) and Southeast Asia, he has established a "China + Southeast Asia" dual-based research perspective that brings Chinese and Southeast Asian art histories into the same field of vision, allowing two independent scholarly trajectories to converge.

In his view, non-Western art scholarship faces a structural predicament: each region is locked in a fixed-star-and-satellite orbit with the West, leaving lateral connections weak. This is not a rigid hub-and-spoke system but a dynamic gravitational field, with the West as the Fixed Star and peripheral regions as satellites—drawn to the center yet retaining their own momentum and trajectories. He argues for multi-lateral comparison across a broader geographic span in order to reconstruct an autonomous cartographic framework for regional art histories. He has crystallized this position into what he calls the "Bali Method"—taking the art-exchange hubs of the non-Western world as units of analysis, bypassing Western mediation, and directly exposing the lateral pathways of artistic transmission within the Global South.

His institutional critique and methodology are thoroughly articulated in his recent monograph, Constructing National Identity: National Museums and Galleries in Singapore (1965–2015) (Guangxi Normal University Press, 2026). In this major study, he investigates Singapore's national museums and art galleries as an integrated "museum system"—a field where colonial legacies, local Southeast Asian aspirations, and the memories of East and South Asian migration intersect—and maps the multiple mirrors of national identity from "Singaporean" to "global citizen." His systematic study of "Nanyang Woodcuts," the first of its kind in Chinese-language scholarship, follows a parallel path, examining the linkages between China and Southeast Asia to address the global circulation of social realist art around the Second World War. Both the "museum system" and "Nanyang Woodcuts" are, in his framework, "Balis" in their own right. A related paper is forthcoming in SOJOURN: Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia.

Parallel to this textual articulation through publication, the 2026 exhibition "Bali Island: Art and the World Beyond the Rainforest"—the flagship research exhibition of the second edition of the Trans-Southeast Asia Triennial at the GAFA Art Museum, which he curated—translates the same methodology into a spatial and visual experience. The exhibition reaches across Latin America, East Asia, and Southeast Asia to find common ground between geopolitical experience and contemporary artistic expression radiating from Bali. Central to the project is his archival rediscovery of the painter Luo Ming—an overlapping figure who connects the Southward art explorations of Chinese artists with the development of the Nanyang Style canonized in Singapore. Luo Ming's repeated appearance across multiple waves of sojourning reveals a decentralized network of mobile Chinese artists—an inter-satellite exchange within a non-Western-centric art world. This discovery revises the established narrative of the Nanyang Style as a solely Singaporean achievement.

He earned his BA in Literature from Hubei University, was a Reuters Fellow at the Reuters Foundation Programme at the University of Oxford, where he conducted research on international journalism, and later graduated from INSEAD in France. He received his PhD in Art Theory from the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA). From 2022 to 2023, he spent a year as a visiting scholar at the University of Southampton, England, conducting research on Global Art and Politics.