Pretty as a picture

A flower painting inspires a colorful dish at Barolo in Beijing. [Photo provided to China Daily]

Can an artist and a chef find meaning together in deep red?

I've climbed an eerily lit staircase to find out. It isn't my usual way to get to dinner, but Tru Wang has made the experience an extra-sensory pleasure.

Wang and Michael Goo are founding partners of Beijing's brand-new art and fashion venue Tru-M, and they used their gallery's opening exhibition earlier this month to combine their passions with food. For the exhibition Virtue, by Korean artist Tae-gyeong Yoon, they invited TRB's chef Franck Pelux to study Yoon's work. The result was a five-course wine-paired menu titled When Art Meets Food & Food Meets Art.

Yoon's works of intertwining lines and dots represent humans' emotional and psychological roadmaps, some of which are being stimulated by our trudge upstairs in the near-dark. When we reach the top, we are nearly enmeshed in a maze of cotton ropes, crafted by Wang to evoke the threads in Yoon's multimedia art. At the end of the maze, the dining room is divided into intimate nooks with tables for two to 10 guests.

The Meaning of Deep Red is a Yoon piece that Pelux re-envisions as a starter plate of Cherry Foie Gras, a potent combination of colors and flavors that Goo says he instantly recognized.

"I know where that dish came from," he says with a grin. "The others? I'm still trying to make the connections."