Kirchick: N. Korean Propaganda Gets Vienna Showcase
Writing in The Weekly Standard, James Kirchick reports on an new exhibit of North Korean art in Vienna:
If the painting Kim Jong Il, the supreme commander of the Korean People’s Army, deeply concerned over the soldiers’ diet were all one had to go on, one would assume that Kim Jong Il is indeed deeply concerned about the soldiers’ diets. Inspecting a humongous piece of fish, the leader of North Korea smiles as two cheerful chefs and a military aide look on with admiration. In reality, of course, Kim Jong Il does not seem to be all that concerned about the nourishment of his military—with 1.2 million men under arms, the fourth largest standing army in the world. Numerous visitors to the De-Militarized Zone along the Korean peninsula’s 38th parallel have noticed that the North’s soldiers are shorter, skinnier, and weaker of frame than their southern counterparts.
The idea of art serving an end beyond the stimulation of the visual senses informs the exhibit “Flowers for Kim Il Sung: Art and Architecture from the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea,” currently on display at the Austrian Museum of Applied Arts/Contemporary Art (MAK) in Vienna. The giant, fluorescent-colored fish picture is but one of 100 paintings and posters in the first exhibition of art from the hermit kingdom to be opened to the outside world. It’s all possible thanks to the cooperation of the National Gallery in Pyongyang and the Paektusan Academy of Architecture. Both institutions, like everything in North Korea, are state-run.
Viennese museum officials have been at pains to deny that there is any political motive behind the exhibit. Their mission is merely to provide a window into a society about which Westerners know very little. “‘Flowers for Kim Il Sung’ should in no way be viewed as a political statement, but rather purely as a unique opportunity to examine the idealizing art of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, which is hardly known at all,” says Peter Noever, director of the MAK, who was inspired to mount the show on a visit to Pyongyang seven years ago. “With this showing at the MAK, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea has broken through its isolation—at least in terms of artistic production.”
But a visit to the exhibit and a survey of the accompanying press materials and programs designed around it paints a different picture. “Flowers for Kim Il Sung” contains no works from before the establishment of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea in 1948. It is not, as its promoters contend, a sampling of North Korean art, but a display of propaganda in service to the late Kim Il Sung and his son. By presenting it uncritically, the Vienna museum is subtly legitimizing the world’s cruelest regime.
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