That Tomorrow Will Be
Opening: 03 pm – 06 pm, Thurs 14 Aug 2025
Exhibition: 10 am – 07 pm, 15 – 23 Aug 2025
Public talk: 03 pm – 05 pm, Sat 16 Aug 2025
Exhibition Room, Vietnamese Women’s Museum
No.36 Lý Thường Kiệt st., Hanoi
From the organizer:
The New Zealand Embassy in Vietnam, Heritage Art Space and the Vietnam Women’s Museum are pleased to present the exhibition That Tomorrow Will Be showcasing outstanding installation and media works of artists from New Zealand: Sorawit Songsataya, Chris Ulutupu, and Georgina May Young.
This is one of a series of activities celebrating the 50th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between Viet Nam and New Zealand in 2025.
Sorawit Songsataya presents Listening Devices (I – X), a series of rattan sculptures inviting an active listening to the rhythmic contours of the earth—a tactile sonic experience that dissolves the boundaries between biology, geography, and ecology. Chris Ulutupu’s New Kid in Town comprises a set of vignettes from a larger series that explores moments of first encounters between two cultures. Georgina May Young’s hand-embroidered textile series evokes a slow and meticulous practice, contemplating the potent potential and ancient knowledge held in the earth.
This exhibition was collectively curated by Melanie Tangaere Baldwin, Dilohana Lekamge, Milly Mitchell-Anyon, Simon Palenski, and Amy Weng as part of an ongoing art residency project to extend connections between artists and curators in Aotearoa New Zealand and Viet Nam and as a follow-up of the visit by a group of New Zealand curators to Viet Nam to engage and connect with the art communities in Hanoi, Hue, and Ho Chi Minh City in 2024. The exhibition is sponsored by the New Zealand Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade and the art residency by Asia New Zealand Foundation.
“That Tomorrow Will Be is a promise to connect again. Sorawit Songsataya, Christopher Ulutupu and Georgina May Young have been brought together to explore resonances between Aotearoa New Zealand and Vietnam, through speculative modes of storytelling that reveal multilayered relationships with the land. The exhibition acts as an introduction to their work, with the hope of forming long lasting bonds.”
– (Excerpt from curatorial statement).
About the artists
Christopher Ulutupu is a contemporary artist of Samoan, Niuean and German descent. Born in 1987, he lives in Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington.
Christopher uses the conventions of cinematic storytelling to interrogate the relationships between landscape and indigenous identities. He employs a cast of actors consisting almost entirely of friends and family in his work. These actors sing, dance and perform, often hamming it up for the camera. There’s pop-culture reference abound, from girl-group renditions of Britney Spears to a loose re-enactment of an infamous drug-fuelled photoshoot for a luxury furs catalogue. However, in these references brown bodies take centre stage. The artist is as much interested here in contending with Samoan and Pacific representation as he is centring his personal relationships—in his work a singer is his sister, the keyboardist his partner, one bride is played by his mother.
Inspired early in his career by postcard imagery of Pacific Island nations marketed to early 20th Century European audiences, Christopher’s video work challenges an assumed affinity between exotic-nature and exotic-person. Vignettes or scenarios are regularly set against striking landscapes, but equally featured are highly constructed environments. With a background in film and theatre, Christopher understands the dramatic potential of scenery. One video might take place high atop the Southern Alps, while another might feature a green screen waterfall. Both tactics are part of the world-making of film, and this is part of Christopher’s skill as a storyteller. Like any good speculative fiction based beyond reality, he creates an internal logic of storytelling. It’s a logic that challenges assumptions placed on brown bodies and seeks to imagine new alternatives for contemporary indigeneity.
Georgina May Young (b. 1977, Te Ūpokorehe, Te Whakatōhea, Irish, Scottish) was born in Ōpōtiki and is based in Ōtepoti Dunedin. A gardener, mother, and textile artist, she works in close connection with Te Taiao (the natural world), building her practice layer by layer through rhythms of care, memory, and time.
Her work moves within whakapapa (genealogy), cosmic kinship, and the memories held in whenua (land), tracing ancestral knowledge and imagining potential futures. Rooted in daily ritual and a slow life, her practice rejects capitalist excess in favour of deep connection, reciprocity, and honouring the mauri (life force) of materials.
Often handwoven, naturally dyed, and embroidered, Georgina’s textiles embody slow methodologies—labour-intensive and meditative processes that honour time as an essential element of meaning.
Drawing from situated knowledge and belief systems related to their Thai and Vietnamese family heritage, along with their second adopted home in Aotearoa New Zealand, Sorawit Songsataya‘s practice foregrounds the interrelated aspects of the social and dynamic natural world through a range of material specificities, including Ōamaru limestone and Chanthaburi sedge. Giving particular attention to the craftsmanship in the Thai cultural context while drawing sonic and geopoetic connections to Aotearoa New Zealand, the artist deploys 3D animation, moving images, installation, sculpture, and sound to explore the complex relationship between places and experiences while addressing positionality, relationality, and reciprocity––commingling the personal and the planetary dimensions within their artistic care.
Sorawit’s recent exhibitions include Thinking together: Exchanges with the natural world, Bundanon Art Museum (2025); Image Economy, Monash University Museum of Art (2024); Seeing in the Dark, Busan Biennale (2024); The Charge That Binds, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (2024); Fibrous Soul, Govett-Brewster Art Gallery (2024); Orbiting Body, Bangkok Art and Cultural Centre (2024); Nature and State, Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden (2022); Thinking Hands, Touching Each Other, the 6th Ural Industrial Biennial (2021); The Interior, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki (2019). He was artist in residence at the Singapore Art Museum (2024), Gasworks, London (2023), the IASPIS in Stockholm (2018), and the Frances Hodgkins Fellowship, University of Otago (2022).
About the curators
Dilohana Lekamge is an artist, writer and curator based in Tāmaki Makaurau. She is currently an Archivist at Satellites. Previously, she was the Curator and Exhibitions Manager at DEPOT Artspace and Gallery Coordinator at Fresh Gallery Ōtara.
Melanie Tangaere Baldwin is an artist, independent curator, arts educator and former director of HOEA! Gallery. Her work has primarily focused on amplifying the practices and stories of Māori and Indigenous artists and artists from marginalised communities.
Milly Mitchell-Anyon is Curator at The Dowse Art Museum, and current co-chair of the Blumhardt Foundation. She has formally been at Dunedin Public Art Gallery, Te Whare o Rehua Sarjeant Gallery and Puke Ariki.
Simon Palenski was the Director/curator of Blue Oyster (2023-25), and he has interned at Dunedin Public Art Gallery (2022) and co-directed the artist-run initiative Paludal (2020-22).
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