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 theyâre 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 donât know.
It was interesting to compare these paintings with their European counterparts. For instance,
when we take a painting like âThe Battle of Waterlooâ 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 itâs cluttered.
Not so with âDeath-defying protectors bound by the barrel of a gunâ 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 itâs a
bit messy.
Also âThe Battle of Waterlooâ 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 doesnât exist.
Here are two youtube links (in Dutch) that allow to compare for yourself:
The Soviet Myth
The Kim Utopia
The Kim Utopia
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