The Dorothy Circus Gallery in Rome is pleased to stage a double solo exhibition of the Chinese painter Jeffrey Chong Wang and the Korean painter Grace Eunshin Kim.

"The Meeting", which opens on Saturday, February 18, explores the personal suggestions of the couple's relationship that characterise the story of these two artists linked in life and work through numerous references to classical painting. The cinematic compositions of Jeffrey Chong Wang intertwine with the playful and dynamic scenarios of Grace Eunshin Kim in an examination of contemporary society through a game of references to the masterpieces of the masters of art history.

In a link between art and psychoanalysis, the double is presented as the theme of a cultured painting, with references to the mysterious code of the Italian renaissance. The works of Wang and Eunshin Kim make us feel poised as we walk through a passage that opens onto the abyss of the mind, where reason and imagination come together in a dance of opposite twins.

The echo of the double portrait travels from afar, taking on meanings and suggestions, from Giorgione to Lucien Freud. This echo, despite always wearing a different dress, comes strong, revealing the soul of the double dream story.

The distant gaze of Wang and Eunshin Kim's characters does not lament the past, but restores an ancient nostalgia that it is unable to hide and thus betrays its restlessness and uncontrollable search for amorous ecstasy. The Meeting opens a gap between the past and the future. Time seems to disappear, giving way to human feeling, which emerges as the embodiment of an elusive present in which we are similar and accomplices.

As we observe Chong Wang's eight new canvases with their introspective surrealism placing him in conversation with Magritte, on the other hand we can observe the new 11 canvases by Eunshin Kim, illuminated by a vibrant palette, express an exuberant plastic force. The face intertwines with the mask, and the mise en scene is populated with dynamic Cranach-like landscapes, frozen by the still image effect borrowed from Balthus.

The tension, both dramatic and ironic, in Eunshim Kim's scenarios, translates into a daily search for happiness. The desire to act, and the previous instant, consume the pursuit of maintaining a happy balance. All this, almost recalling the moment in which Eve's hand reaches down to reach the forbidden fruit, in denial of a possible happiness once the knowledge of good and evil has been internalized.

The introduction of the visual code of Asian painting in the context of the gallery's curatorial programme has the role of completing the cycle of research and osmotic exchange between the languages of the hyper-contemporary, which began with the expansion of the codes of pop surrealism in Europe, and merges today with a surrealism made in Asia, eager to trace and reconnect with elements of classical painting and European culture, an increasingly pivotal and essential reference for study for overseas artists and vice versa.

This is why Dorothy Circus Gallery is proud to inaugurate 2023 with the touching works of these two artists, who have given life to a vast body of work with a refined and profound meaning that invites us to a personal appointment in a cultural and emotional comparison.