13 things to do at Singapore Art Week 2026

One moment, it’s January again, and the region’s pinnacle visual arts season returns, taking over the city from January 22 to 31. Organised by the National Arts Council Singapore and supported by the Singapore Tourism Board, Singapore Art Week (SAW) brings together artists, institutions, galleries, and audiences from Singapore and across the region, centring Singapore as the gateway for artistic exchange in Southeast Asia.

This year’s edition feels especially rich. From unmissable international heavyweights to exhibitions that ask thought-provoking questions, and experiential programmes that reward curiosity, these are The Peak Singapore’s top picks for navigating the blockbuster that is SAW 2026.

The big, can’t-miss shows

Into the Modern: Impressionism from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

National Gallery Singapore

A rare chance to see the iconic masterpieces by Pierre-August Renoir, Claude Monet, Édouard Manet, Paul Cézanne, and Edgar Degas, Into the Modern displays paintings never before paintings in Singapore. 

This landmark exhibition —  the largest French Impressionist exhibition in Southeast Asia —  traces the continuing relevance of Impressionism through themes of urban life, gender, land, and environment, highlighting the emergence of modernity from the artists’ unique perspective.

Developed by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in collaboration with National Gallery Singapore, it brings the movement’s radicalism and enduring impact into sharp focus.

David Hockney: Bigger & Closer (not smaller & further away)

IMBA Theatre in Gardens by the Bay

Experience the world through David Hockney’s eyes in this audiovisual show narrated by the artist himself. Created by Lightroom in close collaboration with Hockney, David Hockney: Bigger & Closer spans six decades of his work, from his groundbreaking portraits and landscapes to his experiments with photography, painting, and perspective. 

Celebrated as one of Britain’s most influential contemporary artists, Hockney’s playful yet profound approach explores how we see and interpret the world, inviting audiences to celebrate the joy of seeing and creating.

Botero in Singapore

IMBA Theatre in Gardens by the Bay

Step into Fernando Botero’s world of exaggerated forms and whimsical scale in this Southeast Asia-exclusive exhibition. Presented by the Fernando Botero Foundation, Botero in Singapore showcases the Colombian artist’s signature voluminous paintings and monumental sculptures spread throughout the Gardens, alongside the world’s first immersive Botero experience.

The exhibition highlights Botero’s distinctive vision of humour and humanity on an extraordinary scale.

Provocative art and ideas

Wan Hai Hotel: Singapore Strait

Warehouse Hotel

Wan Hai Hotel: Singapore Strait transforms the heritage Warehouse Hotel into a shape-shifting exhibition space. Part of a recurring project that resurfaces across maritime geographies, the speculative hotel reappears with new contours each time. 

Presented by international art fair ART SG and Shanghai’s Rockbund Art Museum, this Southeast Asian iteration recasts a former riverside warehouse — in a district once shaped by boat workers, secret societies, and red-light economies — into a vessel for film, installations, performances, sonic interventions, and artist-led gatherings.

It features works by 20 artists whose practices probe ideas on tides, straits, migratory routes, and maritime infrastructures.

Nafasan Bumi ~ An Endless Harvest

Singapore Art Museum

Indonesian artists Bagus Pandega and Elia Nurvista interrogate the human and environmental consequences of Indonesia’s extractive economies. Through kinetic, multimedia, and sculptural works, Nafasan Bumi ~ An Endless Harvest traces materials linked to plantations, mining sites, and electric vehicle technologies, probing the entanglement of resource extraction, colonial legacies and the climate crisis. 

Nafasan Bumi (Earth’s breath) reflects on how natural rhythms are pulled into relentless labour and ceaseless cycles of production, inviting visitors to confront the exhaustion of a harvest that never ends and the future it leaves behind.

Digging Stars by Ibrahim Mahama, curated by Clémentine de la Féronnière and Francesca Migliorati

Art Outreach Singapore

The fourth edition of The Pierre Lorinet Collection features Ghanaian artist Ibrahim Mahama’s first solo exhibition in Singapore, presenting new fabric works, collages, photographs, and video. Known for transforming jute sacks and discarded materials into living archives, Mahama repositions them as charged sites of memory and exchange. 

Digging Stars examines the legacies of colonialism, migration, and global capitalism while reimagining how materials and spaces bear witness to hidden histories.

Three Acts of the Sun

NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore

Three Acts of the Sun is the first solo exhibition in Singapore since 2019 for Amsterdam-based artist Kent Chan. The exhibition features the new commission Weather Casting, alongside recent works where the artist’s tropical imaginaries intersect with global warming. 

Set in a future global tropic, the artworks envision tropicalisation, climate migrations, and geoengineering interventions, framing climate change through the lens of lived human experience.

Situated on the edge of a secondary tropical rainforest, the space surrenders its climate control, allowing Singapore’s heat and humidity to become part of the experience, immersing visitors physically, visually, and sonically in the project’s core concerns.

Symposium: The Politics of Print

STPI

The Politics of Print: elephant in the room reimagines the symposium format as a dynamic, generative space for conversation. 

Curated in collaboration with Stephanie Bailey, two days of panels will feature 25 influential speakers who will expound on topics ranging from traditional print markets to radical printmaking in Asia.

Speakers include Kathleen Ditzig (curator, National Gallery Singapore), Jenny Gibbs (executive director, International Fine Prints & Drawings Association), artists Michael Craig-Martin, Salima Hashmi, and more. 

Artist Cem A.’s Crit Club, a performative work rooted in debate, makes its Singapore debut at the symposium.

Human Being Human: Selections from the Collection of John Chia and Cheryl Loh

The Private Museum

Drawn from the private collection of prominent art collectors Dr John Chia and Dr Cheryl Loh, Human Being Human critically examines the human condition, guided by the conceptual framework of American artist and activist Keith Haring’s iconic “Radiant Baby”. 

The exhibition explores the tension between an ideal state of being and the flaws of lived experience, inviting reflection on identity, selfhood, and our relationship with others in a modern world.

Experiential art programmes

Sonic Shaman 2026: Borderless

Singapore Art Museum

Tanjong Pagar Distripark will host the Singapore debut of Sonic Shaman 2026: Borderless, Taiwan’s first interdisciplinary sound festival uniting experimental sound, performance, and contemporary art. 

Featuring over 20 local and international artists, musicians and thinkers, the festival draws on Southeast Asia’s vibrant histories of sound and highlights emerging experimental practices across the region and beyond.

Through live performances, sound works, and oral presentations, audiences are invited to explore new ways of sensing and imagining the world.

OH! Moonstone: Everything Changes, Everything Stays the Same

Moonstone Lane

The 12th edition of OH!’s flagship art walk, OH! Moonstone: Everything Changes, Everything Stays the Same unfolds across Moonstone Lane, a neighbourhood transformed from plantations, kampungs, bottling plants, and shrines into a residential precinct. 

Visitors glimpse deeply personal worlds — a 1950s home occupied by the same family for over seven decades, a working carpentry atelier, and the Daily Diecast toy store with its vast collection of miniature cars.

A large-scale outdoor installation mirrors the ever-shifting land uses, while sites such as the Lau Clan House, the Sin Choon Huat Temple, and Poh Leng Building act as living neighbours whose layered histories subtly inform the artwalk experience. 

OH! Moonstone invites visitors to wander, notice, and reflect on the hidden layers of life, memory, and connection that persist — or fade — as the city continually remakes itself.

Chapalang

Artspace @ Helutrans

Named after the local term for chaotic, improvised mixing, Chapalang embraces cultural ingenuity as a way of making do — and making meaning — with what’s at hand. Bringing together Southeast Asian artists, the exhibition explores chapalang as a creative practice of repurposing and recombining materials and technologies, and as a way of reimagining our relationship to technology.

First presented in Kuala Lumpur, the show will continue to travel across Southeast Asia, reshaping itself with a new, culturally specific title in each stop.

The Cloth Remembers

aNERDgallery

The Cloth Remembers foregrounds story cloths as powerful visual languages that preserve memory, identity, and resilience. From Hmong “flower cloths” depicting displacement, to Indonesian Batik Kompeni narrating colonial conflict and Chin weavings recalling everyday life, these textiles became archives of resistance, survival, and hope. 

Contemporary artists respond by placing traditional textiles in dialogue with present-day practices, opening new conversations around displacement, cultural identity, and the enduring power of storytelling through cloth.

See the full line-up of programmes here.