He Ao Āpōpō, He Ao Tea—a stunning exhibition curated by Cecelia Kumeroa (Te Ātihaunui-a-Pārāngi)—brings together a selection of works from artists based all over Aotearoa New Zealand to create a multimedia art experience not to be missed. The name of the show can be translated as: ‘tomorrow is a new day, and the new day will bring clarity.’ This expression comes from a proverb authored by Dr Rangitakuku Metekingi of Whanganui iwi. As part of Te Whare o Rehua Sarjeant Gallery’s programming, the show marks a new year in Aotearoa, opening as Puanga and Matariki rose again in the dawn skies, signalling a full life cycle completed in our natural world and a new beginning on the horizon. Kumeroa has brought a new perspective to the proverb from which the show’s title is taken, creating an expansive experience that posits: if we live in a creative present, we will forge a brighter tomorrow.

There are two gallery spaces hosting this show, which functions as a kind of almanac for the Aotearoa year that has been while forecasting the one ahead, inviting us to meditate on the cyclical notion of time. With Kumeroa’s exceptional knack for narrative, we are guided through the process of transitioning into a new phase and the spiral-like nature of the Puanga period—acknowledging an ending and taking stock of where we are, with a new beginning on the horizon. Beginning in the deeply reflective gallery, with walls painted as dark as a winter morning, you begin to imagine it’s all happening now and at once: past, present, future. These artists are working in new and challenging ways, bringing traditional and innovative materials together to make something new and of the moment. Visions arise as you are invited to reflect on the past through the messaging encoded in each work. All in the same room, rimu is glammed up with glitter; 3D-printed whakairo carvings are layered with gaming iconography; and everything is woven together vibrationally with birdsong, piano, kōauau wind-instrument sounds and waves of menacing sub frequencies.

With Kumeroa’s design background and expertise, the works all contain strong design-driven elements, a creative discipline that has become a defining aspect of the city’s identity as a UNESCO global city of design. In the works, you can feel the ways design can distil, and leave necessary space for, a multitude of possibilities.

Hinemoana (2026) opens the show. As you enter the gallery space, an illuminated painting by Peata Larkin (Tūhourangi, Ngāti Whakaue, Ngāti Tūwharetoa) greets you. Hinemoana is our ocean deity, represented through feminine energy—the mysterious depths of the female element in our physical world—expressed through the framing of a kaokao pattern. Larkin says of the work: “Hinemoana rises from the deep blue pulse of the moana, from the place where light enters water and becomes memory.” Her painting process employs an innovative technique that melds contemporary materials and ancestral teachings, with pigments cast in a transparent medium and illuminated. She describes the resulting effect as “holding the last light of day.”

Kōwhaiwhai patterns are original forms of language that are essentially figurative. In these forms, pattern becomes a way of navigating, meaning-making and remembering. In Pūanga (2024), a work by Kauri Hawkins (Ngāi Tāmanuhiri, Rongowhakaata, Ngāti Pāhauwera, Ngāti Porou), the ‘star of orientation’ is represented using retroreflective road-signage materials. These elegant messages meet a highly functional surface designed to bounce light directly back towards the source it came from, with very little scatter. The work breathes new life into, and evolves these language systems encoded with signs and symbols for navigating unknown futures brimming with possibility. The natural intelligence of the world around us becomes the focal point, that which exists within us all—the power of simply feeling it, without needing the words to know.

Tiopira McDowell’s (Ngāti Hine) audiovisual piece, Ohākī (2024), features an award-winning audio track layering the haunting sounds of kōauau and pūrerehua with electro bass. The music video was a collaboration between animator Simon Ward and visual artist James Paratii Lainchbury (Irish, Scots, Ngati Awa), featuring native bats and Transformer-like figures roaming cityscapes, building on notions of the omnipresent influence of Atua, deities. It’s giving prehistoric, gothic and futuristic all at once. These basslines link and reach out towards the other works like branches, providing a stimulating backdrop for taking in the five-metre-long, unstretched oil-on-canvas work by John Walsh (Aitanga a Hauiti), Act 2, Scene 2: There are visitors at the head and they don’t look friendly, let your demon go, you can get him later (2010).

This work reminds us that the present is in the middle of something that has gone before, as a shadowy drama plays out through anthropomorphic creatures in a spellbinding landscape. Meanwhile, what comes next is dawning on the horizon, in a constant state of becoming. Kumeroa has spent a long time with this work, and it is worth taking your time with it if you get a chance. She refers to the “pristine bush scene”, potent with references to the spiritual realm and the layered potentials within our densely woven fabric of reality. “These anthropomorphic forms are living at one with the taiao, natural world, and depicted in these domestic scenes, there is a blurry line between the celestial and human realms. Are they mediators? Messengers? Look, there is a glowing, lit-up cave—what’s happening there?” She adds: “You could write a whole paper just on this painting.”

On the flipside of the gallery, Kumeroa has placed Whakaahuakino (2025) by Kereama Taepa (Te Arawa, Te Āti Awa). Using 3D-printing technology, Taepa has inscribed semiotic elements from the gaming universe and pop culture, combining these contemporary legends and symbols with forms from traditional carving. Looking closely, you can see the Decepticon symbol from the Transformers universe, as well as Sonic and Zelda. There’s an ‘aha’ vibe to it, utilising a visual language that the youngest generations—our digital natives—speak fluently, showing how alternate worlds collide and morph into each other, how they transform us. Navigating through the darkness with the signs and symbols of highly design-driven works, Kumeroa brings the worlds together—the beginning and the ending—by leading us into a bright celebration room bursting with light, joy and energy. A bounty, a feast, breaking through the desolation of winter, with warmth and energy reminding us that we are moving towards warmer seasons and new growth.

Maungarongo Te Kawa’s (Ngāti Porou) waka Hine-Waiapu (2025) brings a sparkly explosion of joy. Te Kawa’s fashion and costume-design experience comes through in a party of glam waka paddlers and mischief-makers. As he says: “All the adversity, all the crap that gets thrown at us, we turn around and we make beautiful things that totally slay. That you can’t turn away from, that you can’t deny.”

Next to this is Tyrone Te Waa (Ngāti Hine, Ngāti Tūwharetoa) with his work Te Pōrere. Kumeroa says: “There are land histories within it but he’s using whimsical visual language and a disarming approach to materials.” His works have been described as ‘biomorphic surrealism’. In The Dreaming Heart Vs the Eager One (2025), Te Waa dives deep through his signature ‘happenchance’ style, explaining that the work explores “love as a grounding concept to measure the state of a relationship even between nations.”

For Kumeroa, opening the show with a pōwhiri process meant that she was able “to create a sense of unity, so that we can all come together in this house.” Formal speeches and songs were shared, expressing stories specific to Te Awa Tupua (the Whanganui River). Kumeroa says every facet of making this show has been about “sharing our world—that we take for granted sometimes. Being able to bring the mana whenua artists onto the home side of the pōwhiri was a special chance to have our artists involved in welcoming people into this whare, and into the show that rests on their ancestral lands.”

The show is a conceptual apparatus through which we can understand and locate ourselves in the world around us. Through the familiar sounds, symbols and textures embedded in our environment, it signifies: I am here. It is a show the community has returned to multiple times, a space in which to imagine the possibilities of where our worlds can glisten within one another, how the parallel realities we exist within can morph and transform, and a reminder of the cyclical nature of time—that we are never untethered from the past, but are always cycling back and forth between yesterday, today and tomorrow.