Portrait of a North Korean propagandist turned protest artist - CSMonitor.com

Seoul, South Korea

For Song Byeok, as for many North Koreans, getting out of his homeland came at a steep price.

Skip to next paragraph

• 

  In Pictures: Cult of Personality: Inside North Korea

Related stories

• Reports of North Korea food shortages overblown, say US, South Korea
• How North Korea has skillfully exploited a defector standoff with South
• Provocative documentary on North Korea opens in Seoul

The soft-spoken artist decided to leave in 2000 to find food, as famine ravaged large parts of the country. During his initial attempt to cross the Tumen River intoChina to find and bring back food, Mr. Song watched as his father was washed away in the surging waters.

“I was about halfway across the river when the rope grew slack,” he says in a recent interview. “My father told me three times to go and leave him and then disappeared underwater.”

Related Choi Hyun-mi, teen boxing champ, spurs fellow North Korean defectors to keep fighting

Mr. Song dragged himself ashore and begged for help from a group of North Korean border guards. “They refused, saying, ‘Why have you survived? You should die also,’ and they beat me up,” he says.

He spent seven months in a North Korean prison camp, where he lost a finger to frostbite and became disillusioned with the regime. After Song was amnestied, he successfully sneaked into China. A year later, after securing a secret passage to South Korea, he arrived in Seoul.

Song is just one of the estimated tens of thousands of starving or disillusioned North Koreans who have fled the country since the mid-1990s, when a collapse of the country’s food distribution systems coincided with a devastating famine.

Propaganda artist

Before fleeing to China, Song was a propaganda artist. In a rural studio south of the capital,Pyongyang, he created grinning portraits of "Dear Leader" Kim Jong-il and vibrant billboards depicting ranks of revolutionary workers and peasants.

Song started painting as a hobby, but his talents were quickly noticed by the authorities and he was soon recruited to work for the regime.

He says the central authorities would present him with strict models outlining the posters’ style and content. Painting “outside the lines” – making personal alterations to the models – was strictly forbidden. “Every line, every angle, it was all presented in the model. It was just copying. There was no creativity, none of the artist’s personality, nothing.”

At his small studio in suburban Seoul, Song unveils a reproduction of a typical propaganda poster, rendered in an apocalyptic palette of reds and browns. It shows a stern-faced worker clenching his weapon, with shrill yellow Korean script running along the top and bottom of the painting: Are you going to live as a free human, or as a slave? Let’s protect the red flag of the revolution until the very end.

“In North Korea, this is an actual slogan,” Song says. “But it could be turned back at them: Are yougoing to live as free men or as slaves? Look at how you’re living: You’ve got no freedom of speech or activity or assembly, or anything in North Korea.”

The Chosun Ilbo (English Edition): Daily News from Korea - Dutchman Missing in N.Korea

A Dutch stamp collector has not returned from a trip to North Korea, the Dutch broadcaster RTV Utrecht reported on Monday.

Willem van der Bijl of Utrecht visited the North on July 17 to buy North Korean stamps and propaganda art. He was supposed to return home on July 30 but has been out of contact.

Van der Bijl had been to the North several times before, but this is the first time he has not contacted his family for such a long time, they said.

After the family reported him missing on Aug. 3, the Dutch government asked Pyongyang through its embassy in Seoul and the North Korean Embassy in Switzerland to confirm his whereabouts, but to no avail. The Netherlands is reportedly considering dispatching its ambassador in Seoul to the North.

The Hague is having difficulty because it has no official communication channels with Pyongyang. No phone calls can be made from there to the Netherlands, so the loss of communication does not necessarily mean danger, a spokesman for the Dutch Foreign Ministry said.

But North Korea experts in the Netherlands are worried about his safety. Prof. Remco Breuker of Leiden University said it makes no sense that the North Korean regime cannot say where he is since it normally assigns guides to all visiting foreigners.

There is speculation that the Dutchman may have been arrested for trying to buy rare stamps from an individual North Korean, whom foreigners are banned from contacting.

If so, this could damage relations between the North and the EU, the Dutch press said. The EU has been talking with the North about ways of giving it humanitarian food aid worth 10 million euros (approximately W15.5 billion).

Photographs of Sikkim by Alice Kandell are Now Online

WASHINGTON, D.C.- Sikkim is high in the Himalaya Mountains of India, bordered by Tibet, Nepal and Bhutan. The setting is remarkable, with steep slopes, thatched cottages, Buddhist temples, cobbled paths and terraced fields. During many visits from 1965 to 1971, Alice S. Kandell photographed vivid scenes from daily life, documenting the culture of the tiny kingdom before it vanished. Three hundred of these extraordinary photographs, showing both people and landscapes, are now online at the Library of Congress. Photographer Kandell has dedicated the rights to the public to encourage worldwide access. Researchers who visit the Library can consult the entire collection of 15,000 color and black-and-white images, which Kandell donated to the Library in 2010.

Sikkim was an independent kingdom in the Himalayas ruled by a hereditary line of kings (Chogyal) from the 17th century until it became a British protectorate, then an Indian protectorate in 1950. Sikkim was formally annexed by India in 1975. In culture and religion, it has been linked closely with Tibet, from which its first king migrated.
In 1963, the last Chogyal, Palden Thondup Namgyal, married Hope Cooke, an American student at Sarah Lawrence College. Cooke then became the Queen of Sikkim and lived with the king and their children during the final years of the kingdom. Due to this fairy-tale romance, Sikkim became well known in America through major magazines and newspapers.

Kandell, Cooke’s college friend, became a frequent visitor to the small, mountainous kingdom and, at the Chogyal’s request, embarked on a project to document the Buddhist way of life in Sikkim. While traveling extensively through a country not much larger than Delaware, Kandell went high in the mountains to meet farmers and traders and photograph their families and homes. She visited monasteries and attended religious ceremonies with monks and lamas, captivated by the music, masks and dances. She captured formal and informal scenes with the royal family in Gangtok, as well as artisans with their crafts, children in schools and the mountainous landscape.

"I tried to use my camera to communicate the warmth and openness of the people of Sikkim. I wanted to capture the beauty that is everywhere," Kandell said.

Prince Palden Namgyal of Sikkim, who lives in New York, said "Dr. Kandell’s collection of photographs represents a rare and valuable snapshot of an era that many young Sikkimese have very little knowledge of today. The pictures are not only beautiful but represent an important historical record of our family. More importantly, they capture the culture, tradition and daily life of a far simpler and more innocent time. We are very grateful to the Library of Congress for preserving Dr. Kandell’s collection and making it accessible to all."

Inspired by her experiences in Sikkim, Kandell assembled a major collection of Budhhist art and religious objects. She also retained her connections to the Sikkimese people. In 2010, Hope Cooke joined Kandell at the Library of Congress to describe their work in Sikkim. The webcast from this program, "A Tour of the Lost Kingdom: Sikkim," can be viewed online.

The Prints and Photographs Division is responsible for acquiring, preserving, securing, processing and serving the Library's unique and vast collection of visual materials, which includes more than 14 million photographs, historical prints, posters, cartoons, fine-art prints, and architectural and engineering designs.

India-Bangladesh art summit begins in Mumbai

Mumbai, Aug 1 (IANS) Artists from India and Bangladesh Monday came together to participate in a weeklong summit dedicated to two legendary artists of the subcontinent, M.F. Husain and Mohammad Kibria.

India's Husain and Bangladesh's Kibria died within two days of each other in June this year. The exhibition, beginning Monday at the Museum Art Gallery, features 56 art pieces.

Scheduled to end Aug 7, the India-Bangladesh Art Summit brings together the works of 74-year-old Samarjit Roy Choudhury and 30-year-old Biswajit Goswami, the oldest and youngest participants. Both are from Bangladesh.

Roy Choudhury, who has participated in several group programmes and six solo exhibitions in various countries, taught at the Government Institute of Fine Arts (presently Institute of Fine Arts, University of Dhaka) for 43 years. He would be displaying two of his creations.

The 14 Bangladeshi representatives include Paris-based veteran Shahabuddin Ahmed, Abdus Shakoor Shah, Afrozaa Jamil, Biren Shome, Mohammad Iqbal, Jamal Ahmed and Kalidas Karmakar.

Among the 14 painters from India are Debabrata Chakrabarti, Kashinath Salve, Ram Viranjan and Bishwa Bose, the organisers said.

"We have a good mix of senior and junior artists," said Kolkata-based Sukhomoy Majumdar, whose organisation Autograph International has tied up with Bangladesh's Gallery Cosmos for the exhibition.

Shahabuddin's untitled oil-on-canvas that depicts people running is the most expensive exhibit priced at Rs.6 lakh.

Among the Indian artists, each of Salve's works are priced at Rs.2.50 lakh.

Young artist Bishwa Basu's two works on display pay tribute to the victims of the July 13 Mumbai blasts. Both the installations on canvas are titled "No More".

"This is my way of expressing my agony at the loss of innocent lives and an appeal to all that such dastardly acts should stop," said Bishwa.

Eleven of the Indian artists and two from Bangladesh have already reached Mumbai. Organisers are hoping that Shahabuddin would also attend.

Kibria, considered a pioneer of the modern art movement in Bangladesh, died June 7 at the age of 82.

Husain, one of India's best known artists, died two days later on June 9 at the age of 95.

Art curators from different countries in Armenia : Public Radio of Armenia

Art critics are came to Armenia to participate in the Art association international summer seminars for the 6th time in the world are experts in different countries joining their colleagues from Armenia, 10 days after the presentations, collective discussion, group readings and discussion are a number of professional issues.

Armenian connection between artists and society is weak, there are no critics, curators, art managers, art, communication, organizing the designers or administrators of this gap began to tend to him early last century to the middle of 90th, when he began to establish relations with foreign countries in 2006 was held in Yerevan summer art workshops, which aim to improve more every year are subjected to structural changes.
July 25 at the beginning of this year's seminars will be completed tomorrow, August 4.