2026 Zhubei Lantern Festival - GLORYLAND

How can a tech city — famous for semiconductors and home to Taiwan's youngest population — find an aesthetic soul of its own? Gloryland is the curatorial theme of the 2026 Zhubei Lantern Festival, personally curated by Mayor Cheng Chao-Fang, in collaboration with curatorial advisor Ling-Li Tseng. It is the third chapter of Zhubei's "tech-aesthetics" trilogy — after "Toward the Future" and "Aquatic Blossoms" — three years that have made the festival the city's most recognizable IP.

Its creative core treats light as the language of the city. Two signature installations lead: Growing Light in the Wind, a stainless-steel and 3D-printed form whose light turns with the breeze; and Sculpting the Wind through Light, which introduces a technological water screen for the first time, forming images of light within mist. Across five tech-aesthetic zones, real-time sensing and interactive computation make the light respond to crowds — so viewing becomes participation. Extending into scent, sound, taste and collectibles, the festival breaks the convention that a lantern fair is something you only look at.

Above all, it is a feat of large-scale execution. Seventeen days are sustained by continuous daily programming — street performers, fire dancing, curator-led city walks — while every weekend stages a headline event, from a waterside concert to a finale concert, with multiple stages and a market running at once. Facing nearly a million visitors, the team managed crowd flow, staffing and safety across a large open site, delivering all seventeen days seamlessly.

It is also a method of city governance: the mayor renews parks, sidewalks and streetlights with the same "aesthetics-first" standard, then uses the festival to build civic identity. Surveys show 83.6% of attendees were residents and a wellbeing score of 7.6/10. Over seventeen days it drew 974,904 visits, a record for the city, while earlier editions won the London Design Awards (Platinum), the Swiss LIT Lighting Design Award and a MUSE Platinum in Lighting. Gloryland proves a tech city can refine its industrial strength into a shared, believable urban aesthetic.