Word: seoul
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...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 by a faceless North Korean child. In Remote Controller, he is a demigod overseeing destruction, militarization...
...wonder Sunmu - the name can be translated as "no divisions," a reference to his wish for a united Korea - refuses to show his face in photographs and frequently moves about Seoul in dark sunglasses and a hat. "I worry for my family back in the North," he says, wary of the brutal punishments dealt out to 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...
Obama debriefed Bill Clinton face to face last week; details of the message that the former President carried from Kim Jong Il are not yet known. But make no mistake, the whiff of horse flesh is again in the air. For now, according to diplomats and officials in Seoul, both the Obama Administration and its allies in South Korea are in agreement: under no circumstances will they back off their demand for complete denuclearization in the North. But a senior official in Seoul tells TIME that South Korea will allow the disbursement of economic aid to the North "in parallel...
...Seoul remains wary of the North's plea for direct negotiations with Washington, given Pyongyang's long history of trying to drive a wedge between South Korea and the U.S. But the official in Seoul stressed that should bilateral talks occur, Lee has confidence that the Obama Administration would be completely transparent in sharing information and in shaping any policy response in conjunction with its close ally in Seoul. South Korea, in other words, won't object strenuously to direct talks should they come...
...With reporting by Stephen Kim / Seoul...