BOOK
REVIEW A
window into North Korea's art
world Exploring North
Korean Arts edited by Rudiger Frank
Reviewed by Michael Rank
For an
impoverished country of just 24 million people,
North Korea receives a remarkable amount of
attention, attracting far more column-inches than
probably any other nation of similar size.
The reasons are all too obvious - nuclear
weapons, a suffocating, trinitarian personality
cult and enveloping secrecy, which makes North
Korea all the more mysteriously fascinating.
Inevitably most reports about the country
are based on second-hand information, by people
who do not know Korean, or else who have visited
the country for just a few days, mainly to boast
of having a North Korean visa in one's passport.
But this book is different: it is based
largely on original research
by scholars with an
excellent knowledge of the language, some of whom
have had in-depth conversations with their North
Korean counterparts. This makes this collection of
essays virtually unique.
Exploring
North Korean Arts is the by-product of the
largest ever exhibition of North Korean art abroad
which was held in Vienna in 2010. The show,
entitled Flowers for Kim Il-sung, was, as the
editor Rudiger Frank notes, "heavily criticized
for exhibiting the paintings without any comment,"
and the book is based on a symposium that was held
"to supplement that missing active discussion of
this difficult and emotional subject."
The
heavily illustrated book covers a wide range of
the visual arts, including such recondite topics
as the design of North Korean postage stamps and
mosaics, plus chapters on literature and music.
At least two contributors, Koen De Ceuster
and Keith Howard, have interviewed North Korean
artists and musicians respectively, during
research visits to Pyongyang, while James E
Hoare's chapter is based on a prolonged stay in
North Korea when he was British charge d'affaires
there.
Several contributors note the
problems of discussing North Korean art with its
authoritarian, highly propagandistic messages. As
De Ceuster notes "in the case of a North Korean
art exhibition, the attraction is not so much the
art itself, as the fact that it hails from the
Democratic People's Republic of Korea.
"The lure of the unknown, tinged with a
certain amount of abhorrence is the main
attraction here."
De Ceuster puts North
Korean art in its historical and theoretical
perspective, quoting extensively from North Korean
publications, and also reports on conversations he
had with artists in Pyongyang in 2005 on their
training and sources of inspiration.
He
tells how the wife of an artist famous for his
paintings of waves, waterfalls and rivers told him
how a group of them had visited an island on the
west coast and how hard it had been to get them
back to the camp for lunch as they were so
absorbed in sketching and painting.
"She
spoke eloquently about the passion and drive of
these elderly artists, about their boisterous
excitement in anticipation of their departure and
the pleasure they took in these field trips," De
Ceuster writes, which tells us a lot more about
what it's like to be an artist in North Korea than
the closest reading of Kim Jong-il's Treatise
on Art.
Frank Hoffmann's history of
North Korean art is impressively erudite. He sees
painting in North Korea as reflecting "a jumble of
Japanese colonial and Soviet administrative models
serving as a frame where Soviet-style socialist
realism met Japanized painting styles (as they
were practised in late colonial Korea)", and
manages to discuss art from the early years of the
regime even though the evidence was "removed
decades ago from official history".
Hoffmann notes that from the 1990s, North
Korean art began to be produced for South Korean
and foreign collectors, and he claims that there
is now "hardly any domestic market". However, an
"entire fine arts production industry" has emerged
for overseas markets, and Hoffman reports that
forged North Korean paintings are being produced
in China to meet high demand.
Aidan
Foster-Carter and Kate Hext consider the idea of
North Korean art as "state-kitsch", which is not
"just some loose term of distaste" but "a
formulaic mode of art that imitates the style and
composition of earlier artworks and cultural
icons."
North Korean art is kitsch on
several levels, they aver, "with a leaden effect
on the possibility of new styles of art. Its
unwavering aim is to stoke sentimental loyalty to
the regime …".
Indeed, kitsch is so
pervasive in North Korea, these two claim, that a
visit to Pyongyang is "the ultimate live kitsch
thrill".
Other contributors are more
dispassionate but no less fascinating: Sonja
Haussler takes a highly informed look at changing
North Korean attitudes to classical Korean
literature, noting that the 1950s was a period of
"relative intellectual freedom in academic
discourse to a degree that was never again to be
possible".
The period from the mid-1960s
until the late 1970s was bleak, but there was a
thaw in the early 1980s, as authorities adopted a
more positive official attitude to classical
literature, although Haussler notes that a
two-volume reference work published in 2006-09
virtually ignored the enormous influence of
Chinese literature on the literature of Korea.
But despite this anti-Chinese bias, almost
all the more recent editions of traditional
hanmun literature include the text in
classical Chinese characters (hanja), while in the
case of pre-modern works in Korean the text is
provided in both the modern language and in the
original.
Haussler also reports that in
1984 there was a "veritable flood" of translations
of foreign literature, including collections of
German, Indian, Chinese and Russian fairy tales as
well as Tales from Shakespeare by Charles and Mary
Lamb. The only 20th-century authors she mentions
as having been published in North Korea are,
somewhat surprisingly, Bertolt Brecht and the
progressive German children's writer Erich
Kastner.
North Korean philately is one of
the more novel topics covered in this volume. Ross
King notes that most stamps have predictable
propaganda themes, with images of the Great Leader
Kim Il-sung or heroic steel workers, but some are
issued mainly, if not entirely, for the export
market and their subject matter is highly
unexpected.
I was surprised to read that
North Korea has issued no fewer than 29 stamps
depicting Princess Diana, although it is doubtful
if any North Korean would dare stick one on an
envelope for posting. One of the unexpected
highlights of the book is a picture of a set of
four wonderfully kitschy North Korean stamps
issued for "HRH The Princess of Wales on Her 21st
Birthday."
King also notes that North
Korea is almost certainly the only country that
has ever depicted cursing on a stamp, on a 1975
issue which shows a muscular, handsome North
Korean yelling "Yankee bastard!" (Yangkhi inom!)
as he is about to deliver a fatal blow to a
cowering, scrawny American GI.
Some of the
essays in this collection are a little too
detailed and seem to be aiming for
comprehensiveness as much as analysis, and I was
slightly disappointed that it lacks a chapter on
film in North Korea.
But this is still an
outstandingly well informed and original book that
is essential reading for anyone interested in the
arts in North Korea and their political and
historical context.
Exploring
North Korean Arts Authors: Aidan Foster-Carter, Koen De Ceuster, Frank Hoffmann, Keith Howard, Kate Hext, Jane Portal , Brian Myers, Dafna Zur, James E Hoare. Editor: Rudiger Frank. Publisher: Verlag fur
moderne Kunst, Universitat Wien, April 30, 2012, ISBN-10: 3869842148,
304 pages, US$43.54.
Michael Rank
is a London-based journalist and translator who
has written extensively on North Korea for Asia
Times Online. He graduated in Chinese from
Cambridge University and is a former Reuters
correspondent in Beijing. He visited Rason in
North Korea in 2010.
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