The Kim Utopia

Last week my boyfriend and I went to the Drents Museum in Assen, The Netherlands. A year ago we went there too for the exhibition The Soviet Myth and this year the museum managed to do an exhibition about North-Korean paintings: The Kim Utopia.

Without a doubt all paintings present are propaganda. Some were really beautiful and detailed and others less so. I started wondering: is this art or craftsmanship? Are these artists comfortable using oils? Do these artists enjoy what they’re doing? Some paintings looked like they were done fast, a bit sloppy and without much joy. It looked like something that had to be done without trying to make it more bearable, which is strange to me. Were some of these people bad painters or would they just rather finish and move on to more enjoyable work? I don’t know.

It was interesting to compare these paintings with their European counterparts. For instance, when we take a painting like ‘TheBattle of Waterloo’ by Jan Willem Pieneman, 1824 (Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, The Netherlands) we see a lot happening. The main characters faces are lit up and painted very detailed. The others less so and sometimes left in a sketchy state which gives the painting depth even when it’s cluttered.

Not so with ‘Death-defying protectors bound by the barrel of a gun’ by Kim Pong-nam (2002). Again the main characters are very detailed but moving on to the rest of the painting the picture is done in crude, thick brushstrokes. In itself quit nice but instead of working spacious it’s a bit messy.

Also ‘The Battle of Waterloo’ depicts a historical event while the North-Korean painting depicts a battle that never happened and works purely as propaganda: the North-Korean army supporting their leader no matter what.

Because we went to both Soviet and North-Korean exhibitions it was hard not to compare the two. In my opinion the Soviet paintings had a look of artists doing their thing in a communist world but still very much propaganda. Most of the North-Korean art looked like craftsmenship being used to depict a world that doesn’t exist.

Here are two youtube links (in Dutch) that allow to compare for yourself:
The Soviet Myth
The Kim Utopia