Lighting up Taiwan’s night sky: pixel control powers the 2026 Taiwan Lantern Festival main lantern
Each year, Taiwan’s Lantern Festival transforms cities into glowing landscapes of art, culture and technology.
For 2026, the celebration returned to Chiayi County under the theme “Illuminating Taiwan · Lighting Up Chiayi”, bringing together more than 600 installations across two exhibition zones.
At the centre of the festival stands the monumental main lantern installation, “Alishan, Veiled in Luminous Mist” — a 21-metre-tall audio-visual sculpture inspired by the sacred forests of the Alishan mountains.
Created by artists Yao Chung-Han, Lu Yen-Cheng, and Rex Takeshi Chen, the installation blends architecture, digital media and theatrical lighting into a living narrative of Taiwan’s geological and cultural history.
Through shifting light, sound and imagery, the tower traces the island’s story from oceanic origins through forests, mountains and human civilisation — transforming millions of years of natural history into an immersive visual performance.
Behind the scenes, this ambitious installation relied on a precise and reliable control backbone powered by ENTTEC pixel control technology.
At the base of the towering sculpture sits a massive circular LED media surface, wrapping the structure in animated imagery that synchronises with the lighting performance above.
To drive this large-scale pixel installation, lighting designer Cheng Hao-Ting utilised an ENTTEC Pixelator Mini system paired with PLink Injectors to distribute data reliably across the structure.
The Pixelator Mini converted Art-Net data into ENTTEC’s long-distance PLink protocol, enabling pixel data to travel up to 300 metres via standard Cat cable without signal degradation.
Working alongside the hardware layer, ENTTEC LED Mapper (ELM) provided the pixel-mapping environment used to configure and program the installation’s animated lighting sequences.
Together, the system delivered synchronised control across thousands of LED pixels integrated into the tower and circular media display.
Project details:
Project: Taiwan Lantern Festival 2026: main lantern
Installation: Alishan, Veiled in Luminous Mist
Location: Chiayi County, Taiwan
Exhibition dates: 3–15 March 2026
Height of installation: 21 metres
Lighting design: Cheng Hao-Ting / Manias Design
Visual direction: Di Yun Narrative – Rex Takeshi Chen
Artistic director: Yao Chung-Han
Structural design: Shih Chien University VISION BASE – Lu Yen-Cheng
ENTTEC control system:
• Pixelator Mini pixel controller
• PLink Injectors for long-distance data distribution
• ENTTEC LED Mapper (ELM) for pixel mapping and show design
Pixel fixtures: 12V RGB pixel LED strip
Throughout the festival, the installation performed a lighting show every evening, transforming the structure into a dynamic theatre of light and motion.
Beams radiated from the tower like sunlight emerging through mountain mist, while animated imagery across the circular display guided audiences through forests, oceans and skies.
Mist effects and powerful searchlights enhanced the sense of scale, giving the impression that the tower itself was breathing light into the night sky.
For visitors walking through the festival grounds, the main lantern became both landmark and performance, visible from across the site and drawing crowds for its scheduled shows.
Precision pixel control for large-scale installations
Large public artworks like the Taiwan Lantern Festival’s main lantern require more than visual creativity — they demand reliable control infrastructure capable of synchronising thousands of pixels across complex structures. ENTTEC’s Pixelator Mini provides a compact yet powerful solution for these scenarios, converting Ethernet-based lighting protocols such as Art-Net and sACN into SPI pixel control. By transmitting data using the PLink protocol, installations can extend across distances of up to 300 metres while maintaining perfect synchronisation between fixtures. This distributed architecture allows designers to create high-resolution lighting surfaces without worrying about signal loss or timing errors.
Technology meets storytelling
The Taiwan Lantern Festival main lantern demonstrates how modern lighting technology can become a powerful storytelling medium. By combining digital animation, architectural structure, mist effects and dynamic pixel lighting, the installation transforms a traditional lantern symbol into a contemporary multimedia performance. ENTTEC is proud to have supported the creative team behind this project, helping bring their ambitious vision to life with reliable pixel control and flexible mapping tools. As festivals and public artworks continue to push creative boundaries, technologies like the Pixelator series make it possible to scale these experiences to ever larger audiences.
