OMEO x Lang Ea
Each month, Boutique Connection supports Sanderson Contemporary Art’s exhibition openings.
This is a collaboration of wine and art pairing where we pair a handcrafted New Zealand wine with the artist’s hero piece. The project explores how taste and texture can echo a visual experience and perhaps even enhance it.
I’m exploring the non-verbal dialogue between art and wine and pairing each artist’s hero piece with a wine that echoes its mood, energy, and emotion.
The aim is to translate visual expression into taste, inviting viewers to experience the artwork through another sensory lens. Each match is intuitive and collaborative, celebrating both the artist’s vision and the craft of our boutique producers.
Lang Ea
Lang Ea is an award winning Cambodian-born, Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland-based sculptor and multidisciplinary artist whose practice explores themes of memory, displacement, conflict, and human resilience. Having fled Cambodia with her family following the fall of the Khmer Rouge regime and later settling in Aotearoa New Zealand, Ea draws on personal experiences of migration and historical trauma to create powerful sculptural and installation works that resonate on both personal and universal levels.
In Conflict to Fusion, this series of highly polished, marine grade stainless steel sculptural works is a compelling new exhibition that examines the delicate balance between unity and separation, harmony and discord, through the simple yet profound form of a water droplet.
Fusion
Lang Ea's polished sculptures are elegant and fluid, yet held in moments of pause, inviting us to reflect on the ways connection can be interrupted before ultimately being restored.
When I first saw this piece, I was struck by its remarkable sense of clarity. The suspended droplet felt almost weightless, its mirrored surface constantly shifting with the light around it. There is movement, precision and stillness all at once, creating a beautiful tension between flow and inertia.
This pairing needed a wine that embodied purity and precision rather than power. Something that carried a hushed, crystalline clarity and an undeniable tension... a wine that, like the sculpture, reveals its greatest strength through elegance and poise.
The wine I immediately thought of was a Riesling I’d tried recently. In particular, a Central Otago Riesling. Grown on a tiny 1-Ha vineyard in Alexandra, the OMEO Riesling is defined by crystalline purity, piercing acidity and stony minerality.
The wine's name adds another beautiful layer to the pairing. Named after Omeo Gully, a landscape shaped by water during Central Otago's gold rush, it speaks of a place where flowing water was diverted and redirected in the search for something precious. Like all great wines, OMEO tells the story of the land from which it comes, making water not only a feature of the wine, but part of its history.
Standing in the gallery amongst Lang's series of maquettes and finished sculptures, glass of OMEO in hand, it clicked. The glacial purity, fine minerality and gentle off-dry generosity of the Riesling seemed to awaken something in the work for me.
The sculptures almost began to sing... their highly polished surfaces catching the light with the same crystalline, high-pitched energy that the wine carried across the palate.
It was glorious - I’m really looking forward to pairing another wine to one of Lang’s future works, perhaps a completely different media next time?
Cheers,
- Renée Dale
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Lang Ea
Conflict to Fusion24 June - 19 July 2026
Sanderson are pleased to present Fusion to Conflict, a compelling new exhibition of sculptural works by award winning sculptor Lang Ea, which examine the delicate balance between unity and separation, harmony and discord, through the simple yet profound form of a water droplet.
At the heart of the exhibition lies a powerful metaphor - the water droplet, moving unerringly along its path and inseparable from the greater body from which it comes, represents a state of fusion - a condition of fluid connection, interdependence, and harmonious existence. In nature, the droplet's journey is effortless; it belongs simultaneously to itself and to the whole.
Yet Fusion to Conflict explores what happens when this natural state is interrupted.
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View Works here.
