There is a moment inside the David Hockney show at IMBA Theatre when the walls disappear. Projections stretch ten metres high across every surface, Hockney’s own voice fills the room, and six decades of work by one of Britain’s most consequential living artists surrounds you on all sides. It is the kind of experience that exists in London and Seoul. As of 21 April 2026, it exists in Singapore too.
IMBA Theatre opened its doors at Gardens by the Bay last Tuesday, unveiled by Acting Minister for Culture, Community and Youth David Neo. Singapore’s first venue purpose-built for large-scale immersive storytelling spans more than 80,000 square feet and comprises a major gallery, two black box theatres fitted with state-of-the-art projection and sound infrastructure, a retail store, a wellness dining concept opening in June, and the Prudential Experience Zone. It is, in ambition and execution, a different kind of cultural institution for this city.
Two Landmark Shows at Opening
IMBA launches with two major presentations running concurrently, and the pairing is deliberate. One looks outward, to a global art canon. The other insists on emotional intimacy.
David Hockney: Bigger & Closer (not Smaller and Further Away) is a Lightroom UK production running until 30 June 2026, making IMBA the only venue in Southeast Asia authorised to present Lightroom’s work. The show spans six decades of Hockney’s career, from early paintings to digital works created in real time, set to an original score by American minimalist composer Nico Muhly. Hockney narrates the entire experience himself. It first launched at Lightroom’s London space in February 2023 and has since played Seoul, Manchester and across China. The Singapore run is its Southeast Asia premiere.
Botero in Singapore, jointly presented with the Fernando Botero Foundation, is something that has never existed before in any form. It is the world’s first tri-format presentation on Maestro Fernando Botero, the late Colombian artist whose distinctive “Boterismo” style of exaggerated volume and wry humanity made him one of the most recognisable figurative artists of the twentieth century. The presentation operates across three distinct registers. Garden Grandeur places ten monumental sculptures across the Silver Leaf Gardens of Gardens by the Bay, free to the public, available until 18 May 2026. Heart of Volume, extended through 31 May 2026, is the largest gallery exhibition of Botero’s work ever mounted in Asia, featuring 118 original works from the family collection. And A Life in Fullness, opening 26 April and running through 31 July 2026, is a 40-minute audiovisual immersive experience narrated by Fernando Botero Zea, the artist’s eldest son and Co-President of the Botero Foundation. It is the world’s first immersive experience ever made about Botero’s life, and it was produced in close collaboration with the family.
What IMBA Actually Is
The institution’s mission is stated simply: Culture for All. But the physical reality of IMBA is more complex and more interesting than that phrase might suggest. The venue is not a museum and not a cinema. It is a purpose-built platform for storytelling that does not yet have a clean category in Singapore’s cultural landscape, which is precisely the point.
Michael Lee, IMBA’s CEO, has described the space as one where curiosity grows, a venue that brings art, technology and the human experience together across multiple formats simultaneously. The building has been developed in collaboration with leading architects, designers and technology partners, with each theatre space calibrated for specific kinds of large-scale immersive work. The Prudential Experience Zone, a 14-metre digital passage, allows visitors to customise avatars transported into a virtual Singapore landscape featuring the Flyer, the Esplanade, and structures made of Nyonya kueh. The IMBA Stacked Store, managed by Singapore’s design-led homeware retailer Stacked Store, offers Botero-themed art prints, rugs, mugs and umbrellas produced exclusively for the venue.
The institution has also announced its commitment to local artists. IC Koh, a contemporary Singaporean artist, will be the subject of IMBA’s first local artist exhibition. Partnerships with Nanyang Polytechnic’s School of Design and Media are in development. The intention is for international presentations and homegrown work to exist in the same building, feeding off each other.
A Different Gardens by the Bay
Gardens by the Bay has welcomed more than 115 million visitors since opening in 2012. It has always been a place of spectacle. IMBA Theatre extends that spectacle inward, away from the Supertree Grove and into something more contemplative and more demanding of attention.
Felix Loh, CEO of Gardens by the Bay, framed IMBA’s opening as enriching the Gardens’ original vision of a living space where nature and creativity coexist. Within IMBA Theatre, the gardens become a stage for immersive arts experiences that stir the imagination and move the heart. It is a considered articulation of what this collaboration is meant to produce: not just more footfall, but a deeper kind of visit.
For anyone who has wondered when Singapore would get its own version of what Lightroom built in London or what TeamLab established in Tokyo, the answer is now, and it is at Gardens by the Bay.
Tickets for A Life in Fullness are available from 21 April 2026, 4pm, at imbaglobal.com/whats-on. Ticket holders receive free entry to the Heart of Volume gallery exhibition. Follow IMBA on Instagram at @be.imba.
