Rice is Socialism: North Korea’s Public Face
By Brady Ng
Kim Jong-il was North Korea’s greatest—and only—published art critic. In his 1992 monograph Treatise on Art, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea’s “Dear Leader” said that art must have three essential qualities: clarity, compactness, delicacy. “If the people who see a picture cannot grasp its meaning,” Kim wrote, “no matter how talented its creator, they cannot say it is a good picture.” In other words, under the Kim regime, there is correct art—that which clearly communicates the leader’s thoughts to those under his authority (and thumb).
Art that fits the Dear Leader’s doctrines is available for sale to outsiders who stop in Pyongyang. Since 1995, longtime aid organizer Katharina Zellweger, working from Hong Kong, has visited North Korea almost 70 times, assisting pregnant women and children with disabilities. During those journeys, she would acquire acrylic paintings by the artists of Mansudae Art Studio, a state-run art production facility that produces all of the visual arts in North Korea, as well as monuments that are exported for other regimes. At the University Museum and Art Gallery of the University of Hong Kong, about half of Zellweger’s collection from North Korea was mounted in “North Korea’s Public Face: Twentieth-century Propaganda Posters from the Zellweger Collection,” the city’s first showcase of state-serving visual arts from the DPRK. As the collector put it, the presentation was meant to show another side of North Korea—the one that she was in contact with for many years, away from the images of “missiles, military and misery” often reported in mass media.
