Hilbert's 19th problem asks if minimizers of "natural" variational integrals are smooth. For the past century, this problem inspired fundamental regularity results for elliptic and parabolic PDEs. It also led to the construction of several beautiful counterexamples to regularity. The dichotomy of regularity vs. singularity is related to that of single PDE (the scalar case) vs. system of PDEs (the vectorial case), and low dimension vs. high dimension. I will discuss some interesting recent counterexamples to regularity in low-dimensional vectorial cases, as well as outstanding open problems. Parts of this are joint works with A. Figalli and O. Savin.