Vivid Sydney closes as world's largest multidisciplinary arts festival

Vivid Sydney, the annual arts festival that lit up the capital of Australia's New South Wales state for 23 nights from late May to mid-June, closed its run having reaffirmed its standing as one of the world's largest multidisciplinary arts festivals.

Sponsored for the fifth consecutive year by South Korea's Samsung Electronics and Kia, the festival ran more than 200 programs across five major zones — Circular Quay and The Rocks, Barangaroo, Darling Harbour and the Inner City — organized around four themes: light, food, ideas and music.

In the light program, Yann Nguema's "Opera Mundi" transformed the Sydney Opera House into a canvas for narrative abstract art through projection mapping, while Chris Levine's "Molecule of Light" became a luminous landmark near the Sydney Harbour Bridge.

Main sponsor Kia brought its design philosophy "Opposites United" to life through an art performance called "Kia Refraction," combining the Kia EV3, dynamic laser effects and reflective structures that reshaped the space after dark into an immersive light art experience.

Samsung set up an interactive space called "Sky Portal Studio" at First Fleet Park, directly in front of the Four Seasons Sydney hotel — a popular choice among Korean visitors. Using the Galaxy S26 Ultra, visitors captured creative photos and videos through an immersive portal frame, reflective effects and motion-based experiences. The Samsung studio drew consistently long queues throughout the festival.

The music and ideas programs drew strong crowds as well, featuring 41 international acts making their Australian debut, a performance by Saint Levant, and a special talk by Academy Award-winning director Chloé Zhao. Also taking part were Academy Award-winning director Sean Baker, Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Jerry Saltz, New York Times bestselling author Roxane Gay and Grammy Award nominee Zane Lowe.