January may be quiet elsewhere, but not in Singapore. Now in its 14th year, the Singapore Art Week (SAW) (January 22–31) energizes the city-state with more than 100 events across fairs, exhibitions, symposia, and public programs, offering multiple entry points into Southeast Asia’s artistic pulse. 

At Marina Bay Sands, ART SG returns for its fourth edition (January 23–25), convening 106 exhibitors from 30 countries and territories. A major partnership with Shanghai’s Rockbund Art Museum marks a decisive curatorial turn, with X Zhu-Nowell overseeing the fair’s Film program, its inaugural Performance Art sector, and “Wan Hai Hotel: Singapore Strait”—the second iteration of her 2024 project, reimagined in Singapore as an immersive, maritime-inflected exhibition at The Warehouse Hotel. 

Sharing the Sands Expo & Convention Centre for the first time, SEA Focus sharpens its curatorial stance in its eighth edition, “The Humane Agency,” foregrounding artists as agents of empathy in a fractured global moment. Sotheby’s reinforces the commercial stakes with a modern and contemporary sale with previews (January 22–24) and the auction (January 25) held at the “Singapore EDITION” hotel.  

Across the city, nonprofit and collection-led exhibitions add texture. The Tanoto Art Foundation inaugurates its program with “Rituals of Perception” (January 21–March 1), bringing together more than 20 international artists exploring presence and embodied attention amid digital acceleration. The Pierre Lorinet Collection presents “Digging Stars” by Ibrahim Mahama (January 16–February 8), marking the Ghanaian artist’s Southeast Asia debut, while The Private Museum stages “Human Being Human” (January 16–April 26), drawn from the John and Cheryl Chia collection.

Several projects lean into experimental formats. Kim Association presents Shuang Li’s first Southeast Asian solo exhibition, a video installation reframing storm chasing as a metaphor for navigating climate, technology, and capital. Newly launched platform SUPER PROJECTS partners with New York-based collective CFGNY for “Certain Forgotten Gestures Near Yourself II,” a live activation at Dover Street Market Singapore exploring doubling and fluid identity.

Elsewhere, lived space becomes both site and subject. “ZHAISHENGJI® Chapter 5,” organized by Pure ArtLab and COSPACE Gallery, unfolds across multiple locations—including a prewar Tiong Bahru flat—to probe migration and domesticity. At Tanjong Pagar Distripark, Supper House’s “空城” recasts the white cube as an HDB-inspired architectural installation, questioning how art is displayed and valued in Singapore.

Discourse anchors the week. SAW Forum 2026 convenes figures including Claire Bishop and Adriano Pedrosa to examine the systems shaping contemporary life. STPI launches its inaugural Print Show & Symposium, culminating in the Singapore debut of Cem A.’s debate-driven performance Crit Club, while Art Outreach Basecamp 2026 opens with a performance lecture by Ibrahim Mahama.

Major institutions provide further ballast. National Gallery Singapore presents “Fear No Power: Women Imagining Otherwise,” spotlighting five Southeast Asian women artists, alongside “Into the Modern: Impressionism from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston,” the region’s largest-ever survey of French Impressionism. Singapore Art Museum (SAM) continues its “Material Intelligence” series with “Nafasan Bumi ~ An Endless Harvest,” pairing Elia Nurvista’s investigations into food politics, ecology, and extraction with Bagus Pandega’s kinetic, sound-driven works shaped by plant biofeedback. At ArtScience Museum, Lawrence Lek examines human-machine entanglements, while Levon Biss unveils macro-portraits of microscopic insects.

The 2025 Singapore Biennale, “titled pure intention,” extends its citywide presence into SAW, activating everyday spaces across five neighborhoods. Complementing this are two National Arts Council commissions: “Isang Dipang Langit: Fragments of Memory, Fields of Now” (January 20–31), uniting 10 Philippine artists exploring memory, place, and identity; and “chapalang” (January 22–February 1), featuring 10 regional artists working across art and technology.

Public programs broaden SAW’s civic reach. “Light to Night Singapore 2026” (January 9–31) celebrates its 10th edition with “The Power in Us,” transforming the Civic District into a luminous urban canvas, while SAM hosts “Sonic Shaman” (January 23–25), bringing Taiwan’s pioneering sound festival to Singapore.

Emerging technologies and speculative futures surface in “Ground Loops” (January 22–31), presented by Feelers with New York’s School of Poetic Computation, bringing together new media artists from Singapore and New York; Debbie Ding’s “Reworlding” (January 20–February 15), which reframes VR histories through works by female Asian artists; and NTU CCA Singapore’s “Three Acts of the Sun” (January 18–February 1), featuring Kent Chan’s meditation on climate futures.

Rounding out the week are Singapore’s commercial galleries, which are entering the season in full stride—read on for ArtAsiaPacific’s picks: 

What Binds Me to This Land
Ames Yavuz
Dec 13–Feb 14

The exhibition brings together Srijon Chowdhury, Cian Dayrit, Tada Hengsapkul, Natalie Sasi Organ, and Nadia Waheed in an exploration of belonging, memory, and the politics of land. Through paintings, textiles, and installations, the artists reclaim narratives shaped by migration, colonization, kinship, and contested territories, reimagining how landscapes hold personal and collective histories.

Yao Qingmei: Steel Garden
ShanghART Gallery Singapore
Dec 13–Feb 15

Paris-based artist Yao Qingmei’s first major exhibition with ShanghART Singapore centers on a new two-channel video installation examining how bodies move through—and are shaped by—structures of power, public ritual, and constructed landscapes. Tracing over a decade of performance, video, and installation work, the show highlights Yao’s shift from embodied interventions to a cinematic language that probes patriotism, spectacle, and collective identity.

30 Years of Gajah: A Retrospective
Gajah Gallery Singapore 
Jan 23–Feb 28

Gajah’s 30th-anniversary exhibition reflects on the gallery’s trajectory through the key ideas and relationships that shaped its vision. Featuring works by Bagyi Aung Soe, Affandi, Yunizar, Chua Ek Kay, Suzann Victor, Vasan Sitthiket, and others, the exhibition unfolds in two sections—“Archives” and “Artists in Focus”—highlighting the gallery’s modernist foundations and its evolving practices.

Dawn Ng: The Earth Laughs in Flowers
Sullivan+Strumpf 
Jan 22–31

Staged at the Singapore Repertory Theatre, the exhibition expands Dawn Ng’s Into Air series (2018– ) with 12 new large-scale paintings—one for each month of 2025. Composed of pigment and earth suspended in ice, then fractured and stitched onto wooden panels, the works melt, drift, and change color over time, evolving according to a geological rhythm.

Citra Sasmita: Women Who Carry the Mountain
Yeo Workshop
Jan 17–Mar 1

In this solo exhibition, Citra Sasmita reimagines the Balinese creation myth Bedawang Nala through an ecofeminist lens, portraying women as guardians of balance between humanity and nature. Through paintings, installations, and textile works, Sasmita honors women’s ritual knowledge, resilience, and spiritual agency amid ecological volatility and cultural transformation. 

Hilmi Johandi: Destination Image
Ota Fine Arts
Jan 17–Feb 28

Hilmi Johandi’s new paintings isolate motifs from archival images of Singapore. Partitioned, flattened, or ruptured spatial planes create staged, uncanny scenes that probe pleasure, escape, and representation, while examining how image-making mediates nostalgia and constructed memory in rapidly modernizing societies.

Mirrorball: Reflections on Portraiture
Fost Gallery
Jan 17–Mar 14

Featuring works by Bea Camacho, Jon Chan, Lavender Chang, Kray Chen, John Clang, and Joanne Lim, the exhibition revisits portraiture as a timeless yet shifting genre. The artists reimagine the human body as both mirror and metaphor, reflecting and refracting identity as contingent, unstable, and socially embedded.

Hasanul Isyraf Idris: Bintang Hijau
Richard Koh Fine Art
Jan 17–Feb 14

Malaysian artist Hasanul Isyraf Idris examines a fragile forest landscape through sustained observation and care. Rooted in the Selama forest reserve in Perak, where the artist is building his studio, the works combine natural materials, drawings, notes, and scientific processes into a visual diary that registers encroaching industrialization, ecological fragility, and local continuity.

Melissa Tan: From One Sky to Another
Haridas Contemporary
Jan 17–Feb 15

Melissa Tan’s new painting series extends her interest in celestial cartography, triangulation, and myth. Treating maps as mobile carriers of knowledge, she overlays faint constellations onto landscapes, suggesting shifting relationships between place, narrative, and orientation. Together, the paintings consider how meaning transforms when mapping becomes fluid.

Yvonne Wang is an art writer and ArtAsiaPacific’s Singapore desk editor.