2026 Lighting UP Chiayi: "Smart City" Lantern Zone

Guided by a vision of environmental sustainability and intelligent future living, the Smart City Lantern Zone responds to the festival theme “Light Up Chiayi, Illuminating Taiwan.” Inspired by Chiayi’s cultural landscape and local industries, the project integrates green energy, digital technology, and environmental symbolism to reflect the city’s transformation from an agricultural center to a hub of innovation.

The lighting zone consists of three featured installations.
1. Urban Warmth Café
Inspired by Taiwan’s familiar coffee culture, Urban Warmth Café transforms the technological landscape of a smart city into a warm and sensory environment. Through light, aroma, and interactive media, the installation reinterprets technology with a human touch.Visitors step into a luminous coffee-inspired space that can be seen, smelled, and experienced, symbolizing moments in urban life when people slow down, reconnect, and share warmth within the rhythm of the city.
2. Timebound Homecoming: The Infinite Train of Hope
Inspired by Chiayi’s historic railway culture, this installation recreates scenes of departure and return deeply rooted in collective memory. A pair of large-scale LED light walls forms an immersive corridor that allows visitors to “travel through time.” The train becomes a metaphor for homecoming, aspiration, and new beginnings, guiding audiences from Chiayi’s past toward its future. Through interactive media, visitors become active participants in this evolving narrative of place and memory.
3. Whispers of the Tea Garden
Inspired by the terraced tea landscapes of Alishan and the vast horizon of the Chianan Plain, this installation transforms agricultural data into an immersive landscape of light and sound. Columns of varying heights form a spatial composition reminiscent of tea terraces. Lighting and sound are generated from real environmental data—including temperature, sunlight, humidity, and soil moisture—collected from Alishan tea gardens. Emerging in the night, the installation becomes a living “Data Tea Garden,” where landscape, agriculture, and technology converge.