Word: koreanness
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...North Korea A Tentative Thaw After months of diplomatic tumult, North Korea appears to be re-engaging with its neighbor. On Aug. 23, a high-level delegation from the North attended the funeral of former South Korean President Kim Dae Jung and bore a "conciliatory message" to current leader Lee Myung Bak. And in a rare meeting on Aug. 26, the two sides reopened talks on reuniting families separated by the 1950-53 Korean...
...spent four years as a propaganda artist, portraying North Korean leader Kim Jong Il in unvaryingly heroic poses, but now the painter Sunmu is having fun with the form. Since arriving in the South in 2001, 38-year-old Sunmu - it's an assumed name - has been lampooning his old master from a musty studio in a run-down suburb of western Seoul. In the eponymous work Kim Jong Il, the North Korean supremo is shown in a pink tracksuit, grinning and fat. In Please Have Some Medicine (pictured), he is a dying hospital patient being offered Coca-Cola...
...defectors' relatives - never mind the relatives of defectors who choose to subvert the revered likeness of the Dear Leader or who produce blasphemous images of the worker's paradise. One of Sunmu's best-known series of works, the Happy Children paintings, features rows of identical North Korean youngsters wearing fixed, disturbing grins that radiate hysteria rather than joy. "No one knows what happiness is in North Korea," Sunmu explains. "They are just told to be happy." (See rare pictures from inside North Korea...
...Diplomats and expatriates are among Sunmu's best customers, because curiously his work meets with a mixed reception from many South Koreans. Tough national security restrictions govern any display of North Korean imagery, and pictures of Kim Jong Il are no laughing matter to some gallery owners and officials, even if the satire is leaping off the canvas. Organizers removed a Sunmu painting of Kim Il Sung, Kim Jong Il's father and the founder of North Korea, from an international festival in Pusan last year. (See pictures of Kim Jong...
...migration during the Cold War. The show is being held as part of the commemorations for the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, and runs from Oct. 10 to Nov. 15. It doesn't look like there will be a repeat of German reunification on the Korean peninsula anytime soon, but Sunmu can still hope. One of his strangely poignant paintings depicts a group of teenagers from the North and South - sharing Starbucks coffee...