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January in Singapore has that particular charge – bright, kinetic, and ready to set the tone for the year. As the first major stop on the global art calendar, the city offers a perfect way to start 2026. Follow our trail of exhibitions, performances, and detours across Singapore and get a head start on the artistic dynamism of the new year.

At the heart of the bustle is ART SG, returning to the Sands Expo and Convention Centre, Marina Bay Sands, from 23–25 January 2026 (with Preview & Vernissage on 22 January). Launched in 2023, it has quickly become Southeast Asia’s leading global contemporary art fair, offering a concentrated view of current practice while connecting Singapore to the region’s collecting, conversation, and cultural exchange.

ART SG’s rhythm is shaped by its three core sectors. Galleries is where leading international and regional names stage their strongest presentations; Focus makes room for curatorial risk and evolving practices – especially digital and new media – spotlighting emerging to mid-career artists; and Futures is the forward-looking engine room for young galleries under ten years old, showing specially created work from the past 18 months that hasn’t previously been exhibited in a gallery or institutional setting. If you notice a heightened attention to performance, film, and live encounter, that’s not accidental, as the fair continues to push beyond booth-walking into a more immersive cadence.

That feeling intensifies with this year’s clearest regional signal: S.E.A. Focus is co-presented within ART SG for the first time, anchoring the week with a focused Southeast Asian contemporary lens. The 2026 edition – curated by John Z.W. Tung with artistic consultation by Emi Eu – Is themed The Humane Agency, exploring artists as agents of compassion amid urgent global challenges: conflict and the longing for peace, ecological crisis, and the movement of communities across borders.

From there, it’s a short step into one of the week’s most emotionally direct experiences – Melati Suryodarmo’s I Love You (2007), part of the �鶹�� Art Collection and presented in the �鶹�� Art Studio on the show floor. Choreographed as an intense five-hour performance on single-channel video, Suryodarmo moves through a stark red room carrying a large sheet of glass, repeating “I love you” until the phrase shifts from declaration to ritual – love tinted with urgency, danger, vulnerability, and endurance. Even as documentation, the work feels palpably alive: you register breath, strain, time passing, and the fragile weight of what’s being carried.

If you can, make sure to catch the artist’s re-performance in the �鶹�� Art Studio on 22 January from 4.00–7.00pm, as well as her reflections on the work at the talk Melati Suryodarmo: In the Moment on 23 January, from 12.30–1.30pm, in the ART SG Talks Theater. Framed around endurance, repetition, love, vulnerability, emotional labour, and the politics of the body, the conversation – led by �鶹�� Art Collection’s Elaine Choi – opens onto what collectors and institutions increasingly have to contend with: how performance persists through memory, documentation, and collection after the live moment has disappeared.

And once you’ve taken in Marina Bay Sands, Singapore Art Week (22–31 January 2026) is waiting to pull you out into the city. The best way to experience its overlapping exhibitions, installations, performances, and events is as a sequence, so follow the river and let the city’s surprises wash over you.

Start at Robertson Quay, where hospitality becomes an exhibition format at The Warehouse Hotel. Here, Rockbund Art Museum and ART SG present Wan Hai Hotel: Singapore Strait, a first-of-its-kind immersive staging in a restored heritage hotel lobby, combining institutional-level curation with the casual intimacy of coming and going. Featuring �鶹�� Art Collection artists Dawn Ng and Robert Zhao, film and video programmes, site-specific interventions, installations, performances, and artist-led gatherings unfold in a space usually designed for waiting, turning a lobby into a threshold between worlds.

Just nearby, keep the river as your guide and step into print’s deep time at STPI, 41 Robertson Quay, for The Print Show Singapore (22–31 January). Pairing a group exhibition with a forum of talks and conversations, it traces the vibrant landscape of printmaking in contemporary art. The artist list signals the range – spanning �鶹�� Art Collection artists Do Ho Suh, Louise Bourgeois, David Hockney, Sol LeWitt, Julie Mehretu, Rirkrit Tiravanija, alongside Yayoi Kusama and more – making the case for print not as a secondary medium, but as a core engine of ideas, reproduction, and experimentation.

Stay in the same pocket of the city, and let material become atmosphere at another �鶹�� Art Collection artist, Dawn Ng’s, solo exhibition The Earth Laughs in Flowers. Installed in the black-box space of the Singapore Repertory Theatre at Robertson Walk, the show becomes an immersive encounter with time: 12 large-scale paintings made from pigment and earth frozen into ice blocks, then shattered and sown onto wooden panels, each one a time capsule of a month in 2025. It recalibrates your pace; you start to look not for subject matter, but for duration, and how long it took for matter to change state, to break, to settle.

From the river’s cultivated ease, shift to a different kind of urban memory in Tiong Bahru, where history sits low and close to the ground. In the neighbourhood’s Air Raid Shelter, Digital Art Week Asia (DAWA) presents 99 years (19–26 January), a new media exhibition reflecting on the temporal nature of life, also featuring �鶹�� Art Collection artist Robert Zhao. The title nods to the practical “99-year” leasehold horizon and the strange seduction of “eternity” as an idea, one made sharper by the setting: a space built for survival, waiting, and compressed time.

Then, to feel Singapore’s transformation as a lived choreography, book a walk with OH! Open House for OH! Moonstone. Set in and around Moonstone Lane and a decommissioned factory, the 12th edition explores“Everything Changes, Everything Stays the Same” through four site-specific artworks embedded in private and public spaces across a neighbourhood that has shifted from plantations and kampungs to warehouses, shrines, and residential streets.

Finally, if by the end of the week you feel your eyes have done a marathon, find some relief by tuning into sound. At SAM at Tanjong Pagar Distripark (The Spine), Sonic Shaman 2026: Borderless (23–25 January) arrives in Singapore for the first time, uniting experimental sound, performance, and contemporary art in a trans-disciplinary “music festival” format. With its “Borderless” theme of sound and experimentation moving across geographical, cultural, physical, and temporal boundaries, it’s an ideal closing note for a week that begins with the fair’s concentrated intensity and ends with the city dissolving into resonance.

And on this reverberating note, make sure to move slowly through Singapore, to follow the river, and to let the city’s art season meet you at every turn.