The year begins under a different kind of glow. Arriving a full additional weekend ahead of their usual schedule, Light to Night Singapore 2026 opens the arts calendar with a sense of ceremony, casting the Civic District into a luminous state of gathering. For four weekends, the city feels momentarily enchanted, where familiar spaces made strange, histories resurfacing, and art operating as a quiet magic that binds strangers into community.

Celebrating its landmark 10th anniversary, this year’s festival takes on the theme The Power in Us, where the festival unfolds like a collective rite, transforming lawns, monuments, facades and corridors into sites of gathering and memory. What is usually formal, commercial or overlooked becomes charged with feeling, where ancestral echoes surfacing in public space, familiar places made strange again through art, light and participation.

Organised by National Gallery Singapore, the 2026 edition marks the festival’s longest run yet, and the festival at its most confident: celebratory, deeply Southeast Asian, and unafraid of sentiment, spirituality and scale. One of the key components of the festival this year is SANTAI, a newly commissioned series inspired by the Malay word meaning “to relax”.

SANTAI reframes rest, gathering and slowness as powerful acts. Spread across five key sites, the Padang, Empress Lawn, Esplanade Park, ACM Green and The Arts House, the series invites audiences not to rush through art, but to sit with it, touch it, rearrange it, walk through it and linger. These are installations that have been crafted to be inhabited, to rest, and to commune.

Nowhere is this more evident than at the Padang, where Firdaus Sani’s Rumah Laut (Coastal Home) rises quietly against one of Singapore’s most symbolically loaded civic spaces. A fourth-generation Orang Laut descendant, Sani reimagines the coastal houses of Singapore’s indigenous sea communities: Orang Gelam, Orang Kallang, Orang Seletar and Orang Selat. Visitors can enter a dialogue between past and present as they step foot into this contemporary reimagining of the coastal house, known as “rumah laut” in Malay, informed by materials traditionally integral to coastal dwellings such as “mengkuang” or “nipah” (palm) leaves and “bakau” (mangrove) wood. Appearing like a mini pavilion, it encourages gathering, respite, and discovery.

Set within the geometry of colonial architecture and national ceremony, Rumah Laut feels like an apparition from another timeline. It honours lifeways eroded by land reclamation and urbanisation, bringing ancestral memory back into dialogue with the present. Across its three sites, including a constellation-inspired light path recalling star-based navigation and a tribute to traditional bubu fishing traps, the work becomes both shelter and memorial. This is a reminder that before the city, there was the sea, and even before monuments, there were people who built it, and built lives around these spaces.

If Rumah Laut speaks to ancestral loss and endurance, Taiwanese artist Michael Lin’s works pulse with collective joy. Across Untitled Gathering in the Singapore Courtyard and Gathering on the Lawn at the Padang, Lin transforms public participation into the medium itself.

Hand-painted furniture bearing batik-inspired motifs can be rearranged freely at National Gallery Singapore. Artist-designed paper lantern bags are arranged on the Padang, and can indeed be carried home as souvenirs of shared experience. Drawing from Peranakan visual culture and Southeast Asian textile traditions, the works dissolve barriers between art and everyday life. Power emerges from proximity, generosity and use, and simply the idea of participation.

As night falls, the festival leans into the uncanny, and one’s journey around the district uncovers one fascinating installation after another. At Esplanade Park, Syahmin Huda’s Batu Ghaib (The Unseen Stone) evokes the lingering spirits of place. Inspired by Malay beliefs and the mystery of the Singapore Stone, the split boulder is inscribed repeatedly with the incantatory phrase timbul tenggelam: “to rise, to sink”. The work suggests that land is not inert, but alive with memory and voice. Walk through the split in the middle, and it feels as if you’re entering a different realm.

Nearby at The Arts House, The Looking Glass of Language by Amanda Tan and Irsyad Ishak turns words into living entities. Motion-activated anagrams and mirrored surfaces cause letters to rearrange and mutate, framing language not as a fixed system but as an energetic, unstable force shaped by encounter. These works feel less like installations and more like subtle spells, and invitations to look again at what is usually taken for granted.

At Empress Lawn, Weixin Quek Chong’s Instar Dreaming (in slow wave) presents four sculptural pods inspired by the moulting stages of insects. Softly responsive to sound and wind, the forms encourage touch and movement, evoking cycles of rest, growth and transformation. Appearing as cocoons if left behind by giant moths, it allows the imagination to run free, wondering where its former inhabitants have flown off to, and turns the micro into something macro – uncanny but fascinating.

Light to Night 2026’s expanded Art Skins on Monuments series turns facades into canvases for regional storytelling. Across the Civic District, Southeast Asian histories surface, ecological, agricultural, spiritual and social. At the Arts House, Larut’s Tears, developed through long-term collaboration with Semai communities in Malaysia, reflects on ecological grief through the story of Larut the elephant. Gentle in tone but weighty in implication, the work contrasts extractive histories with indigenous relationships to land, allowing meaning to arrive slowly rather than insistently.

On the National Gallery facade, fyerool darma’s ⱥn§ibløm∞ (Ansiblomoo) emerges as a hypnotic centrepiece. Over four minutes, a glowing synthetic thread expands into an entangled fibre-optic ecosystem, blending the organic and the artificial. Digital infrastructure takes on the quality of ritual, beauty intertwined with critique and complicity. It is a powerful reminder that technology, too, carries ghosts, but of labour, extraction, memory and care.

Alongside these, Ngoc Nau’s Memory Gesture reflects on Vietnam’s changing agricultural landscape, while stART Here: From Every Vantage Point foregrounds the voices of youths navigating their own quiet struggles through clay-based forms. Together, these projections insist that Southeast Asia is not a backdrop, but an author.

Inside the National Gallery Singapore, Navin Rawanchaikul’s SINGAPORAMA hangs overhead in unapologetic colour and scale. Styled like vintage cinema posters, the monumental paintings celebrate the many lives that make Singapore, where migrant workers, artists, everyday citizens, familiar street scenes and pop culture excess.

Nostalgic, heartfelt and proudly sentimental, the work feels like a love letter to the city in all its contradiction. It doesn’t polish or abstract. It remembers. In doing so, it recalls a time when stories were loud, communal and deeply felt.

Beyond the Civic District, the festival spills into malls, underpasses and everyday corridors. Void (Deck) The Walls transforms commercial spaces into glowing tributes to void decks and communal rituals, while Burrows at Funan imagines an underground society built on cooperation and care.

Even the programmes echo this ethos. From open community choirs and comedy-inflected gallery tours led by Zaki Hussain, to tarot-inspired power card readings and late-night performances, Light to Night consistently lowers the barriers around art. Humour, play and participation are key here to bring everyone together, and chase away the anxieties of the year ahead.

Light to Night Singapore 2026 uncovers what has always been there: ghosts of the past embedded in stone and water, rituals hidden in everyday gestures, magic lingering in the act of gathering. In once again reclaiming public space as a site of memory, spirit and shared authorship, the festival offers to show visitors a city momentarily unbound from efficiency and spectacle, glowing instead with care, connection and quiet power. For ten editions, Light to Night has lit up Singapore in January. This year, take a closer look, and listen to its stories.

Photos courtesy of National Gallery Singapore

Light to Night Singapore 2026 runs from 9th to 31st January 2026. More information on programmes and installations available here