Now in its fourth edition, ART SG, Southeast Asia’s leading international art fair presented by Founding and Lead Partner UBS, opens in Singapore from 23 to 25 January 2026 at Marina Bay Sands. With over 100 exhibitors from more than 30 countries and territories, the fair expands its platform with deeper partnerships and programming, signalling a more expansive and inclusive chapter for contemporary art in the region and beyond.

This year marks the first time that S.E.A. Focus is presented within ART SG, offering a distinctive curatorial platform under the theme The Humane Agency to spotlight Southeast Asian contemporary art and artists as agents of compassion. Curated by John Tung, the platform foreground Southeast Asian contemporary art and artists as agents of care, empathy, and social imagination. Tung’s curatorial framework considers how artists respond to shared conditions of precarity, environmental urgency, and social responsibility, positioning art as an active proposition for more humane futures rather than a passive reflection of crisis.

The fair also unveils the ART SG FUTURES Prize presented by UBS to an outstanding emerging artist featured in the FUTURES sector and continues the SAM ART SG Fund for the second year, supporting acquisitions for the Singapore Art Museum’s collection of international contemporary art from a Southeast Asian perspective.

In a first-of-its-kind cultural sponsorship, the  the TVS Initiative for Indian and South Asian Contemporary Art is curatorially advised by Studio Public Memory and led by Srinivas Aditya Mopidevi, brings robust attention to Indian and South Asian contemporary practices. The UBS Art Collection presents Indonesian performance artist Melati Suryodarmo’s I Love You (2007) at the UBS Art Studio. A new curatorial collaboration with Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai introduces a dedicated Performance Art sector at the fair, and the offsite immersive project Wan Hai Hotel: Singapore Strait opens at The Warehouse Hotel in Chinatown as part of the wider Singapore Art Week program. The Institutum and Hampi Art Labs debut a collaboration foregrounding ecological research by artists Robert Zhao and Atul Bhalla.

Magnus Renfrew, Co-founder of ART SG, remarks that the fair continues to grow as a platform for contemporary art in Southeast Asia and beyond, noting the debut of S.E.A. Focus and the fair’s potential to connect galleries, artists, and institutions internationally. Jin Yee Young, Co-Head UBS Global Wealth Management Asia Pacific and Country Head UBS Singapore, highlights Singapore’s optimism about the global art market and UBS’s commitment to supporting emerging artists, reiterating the importance of ART SG as a place for artistic dialogue and engagement.

At Artitute we like to highlight not only what is seen, but why it matters and how it resonates. We look toward artists whose practices think deeply about identity, ecology, time, space, community, and narrative. Within ART SG 2026 several figures and collectives embody these concerns in ways that feel urgent, reflective, and generative.

John Clang: Intimacy, Ritual, and Presence

One of the most compelling presences at the fair is John Clang, whose performance works invite intimate engagement and reflection. Within the newly introduced Performance Art sector curated by X Zhu-Nowell, Clang presents works such as Nine Chairs, Table of Inquiry, and Reading by an Artist, which unfold as relational encounters between artist and viewer. His practice draws on concepts of time, domestic ritual, and Purple Star Astrology, exploring how energy, presence and meaning emerge in shared moments.

Clang’s presence extends beyond the fair halls into the city’s fabric through his participation in Wan Hai Hotel: Singapore Strait at The Warehouse Hotel in Chinatown. This immersive exhibition, co-presented by ART SG and Rockbund Art Museum, transforms the hotel into a site of performance, installation, conversation, and encounter. Clang’s Reading by an Artist, a thirty-minute performative exchange between artist and one viewer at a time by reservation, recurs across several days of the project, inviting visitors into a personal yet public act of articulation and presence.

The Wan Hai Hotel project itself engages maritime histories and relations through works by over twenty artists, examining the Singapore Strait not only as a passage of commerce but as a lived zone shaped by movement, memory, and power relations, bringing these themes into architectural and social space.

Warin Lab Contemporary: Ecological Inquiry and Material Poetics

At Warin Lab Contemporary, the practices of Imhathai Suwatthanasilp and Prach Pimarnman foreground ecological and material inquiry. Suwatthanasilp’s work begins with human hair as both personal archive and metaphor for ecological loss, asking how life forms far smaller than us reflect broader patterns of environmental collapse. Imagined futures such as Under the Dark Sun consider life in altered planetary conditions, connecting seasonal cycles, microbes, and human routines in poetic, speculative exploration.

Prach Pimarnman’s work traces land transformation through materials such as charcoal and brick dust from local environments, using these elemental residues to document ecological change over time. Together these practices demonstrate how material histories and environmental systems can be read through deeply embodied artistic inquiry.

Yeo Workshop: Rewriting Myths Through Female Narratives

Yeo Workshop’s presentation of Citra Sasmita highlights a powerful reconfiguration of myth and tradition. Grounded in Balinese temple art and the Ramayana, Sasmita reclaims and reimagines narratives that have historically marginalised women, bringing forward perspectives of empowerment, embodiment, spirituality, and material symbolism. Her use of traditional motifs such as lotus and fire here becomes a language of resilience, rebirth, and empathy, producing works that are formally rich and conceptually layered.

Chow and Lin at Whitestone Gallery: Data, Grain, and Systems of Care

Within Whitestone Gallery’s presentation, the collaborative practice Chow and Lin unfolds Even If It Looks Like Grass, a project that triangulates agriculture, satellite imagery, and contemporary data infrastructures. Beginning with wheat as a foundational human crop and moving through systems that now underpin digital economies, the work reflects on how human societies cultivate both food and information, and how these systems shape care, labour, dependency, and environmental consequence. Through research and visual enquiry, they offer a framework to rethink agriculture, data, and human intention as deeply entangled realms.

A Fair Attuned to Experience

ART SG 2026 feels attentive, expansive, and present. With a curated Platform of large-scale installations and performances, an experimental FILM program titled Would You Tell Me a Story Until I Fall Asleep? inviting contemplative engagement, and a robust TALKS program featuring panels and conversations with international artists, curators, and thinkers including Melati Suryodarmo, Jitish Kallat, Ibrahim Mahama and others, the fair situates art as generator of dialogue, community, and reflection.

ART SG opens its public days from 23 to 25 January 2026 with an opening Vernissage on 22 January, at Marina Bay Sands Convention Hall, Level 1 and Basement 1, Singapore. Alongside the fair, programmes across Singapore Art Week offer expanded opportunities for activation, conversation, performance, film, and reflection.

For full details on exhibitions, film screenings, talks and public programmes, visit the official ART SG platform, film and talks pages.