Word: jonge
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...Their output is seldom sold or shown abroad. But "The World According to Kim Jong Il," an exhibition that will run at Rotterdam's Kunsthal museum until Aug. 29, offers a rare and fascinating look at the captive artists' spin on life in the Hermit Kingdom. The 285 works on display are relatively recent, but they might easily have come from Stalin's Soviet Union or Mao's China. The North Korean art clock seems to have stopped circa 1930-50, and the impression that emerges from the exhibition is of a remote, sad and strangely poignant land...
...artists in North Korea, self-expression is a dangerously foreign notion. Their mission is to toil as salaried functionaries in dictator Kim Jong Il's propaganda machine. They work in studios that turn out government-commissioned works in government-approved styles. The most famous studio is Mansudae in Pyongyang, a huge enterprise employing hundreds of artists, but studios are also maintained by regional and municipal authorities-and even the state railroad company. The artists work regular hours, are expected to produce a stipulated quota of works, and are sometimes enlisted in "speed-war" contests that test their ability to pump...
...flank the entryway and set the stage for this strange trip into the time-warped world of North Korea. On the right, spiffy, Mao-suited founding father Kim Il Sung surveys a construction site, surrounded by smiling, hard-hatted laborers; on the left, plump and girlishly handsome son Kim Jong Il stands on the deck of a speedboat, surrounded by marines. Visitors then walk through a series of galleries enclosed within a giant red-walled box set up in the museum's hangar-like exhibit space. "It's like entering the cocoon of North Korean reality for a short time...
...Many of the posters trumpet Kim Jong Il's "Army First" propaganda that touts the military not only as a fighting force but as a model of devotion and discipline. (Not coincidentally, it is also a key power base for the Dear Leader.) In one poster, a rifle-toting soldier leads a miner, a steelworker, a farmer and a scientist, urging, "Behind the Army First Flag, Forward March!" The backgrounds of posters like this typically feature icons of North Korean modernity-missiles, smokestacks, construction sites, dams, electricity towers, desktop computers and walkie-talkies, which seem to possess the kind...
Believe it or not, North Korea has a literary scene, although its indomitable muse is Kim Jong Il, who keeps writers on the national payroll to pen books about himself and who has personally written (according to Pyongyang) a nonfiction work on film and even some poetry. Kim Il Sung, the Dear Leader's father, once dubbed writers "engineers of the human soul"?but he and his son have always had strict control over the project specs...