Truthfulness in North Korean Art PDF

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Min-Kyung Yoon

In North Korean paintings, history is mobilized to legitimate the North Korean system and its leaders. Utilizing the mode of socialist realism, North Korean paintings give visual form to a socialist world, a utopian vision full of unremitting heroism, harvest, and happiness centered on the ruling Kim family. In these paintings, positive heroes such as laborers, workers, farmers, and children are depicted in historically correct scenes that always propel the North Korean revolution forward. After adopting socialist realism from the Soviet Union, North Korea localized this creative method to meet its specific political needs through medium and content. Through this process, socialist realism came to reflect the ideals of juche, the state ideology of North Korea. Informed by North Korean theoretical writings on art and art reviews, this article examines how history is visually mobilized in three paintings created in 1985 and 2000 through the language of juche realism. Keywords: North Korean art, socialist realism, politics of art, chuch’e (juche) realism Realism is a creative method that properly realizes and truthfully reflects objective reality. . . . The socialist realism of our time is in essence the creative method of juche—juche realism. —Kim Jong Il

These words are translated from Misullon (Treatise on Art), purported to be written by Kim Jong Il, the second leader of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK, North Korea), and regarded as the definitive work on North Korean art theory. Published in 1992, the Treatise on Art is the culmination of a decades-long development in fine arts theory. Intended for domestic consumption, Min-Kyung Yoon is a visiting researcher at the École française d’Extrême-Orient, Seoul Center. Journal of Korean Studies 25, no. 1 (March 2020) DOI 10.1215/07311613-7932298 © 2020 by the Trustees of Columbia University in the City of New York

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Visualizing History: Truthfulness in North Korean Art

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this dense tome lays out the theory that underpins the creation of the fine arts and solidifies Kim Jong Il as the sole theoretician of North Korean art. Even before the publication of this text, however, Kim Jong Il’s influence on the cultural realm prevailed with his official rise as the heir to his father during the early 1980s, when all achievements in culture were attributed to him as part of the succession of power. Within this political backdrop, the 1980s witnessed the continued efflorescence of juche (chuch’e, commonly defined as self-reliance) art from the 1970s, which glorified the revolutionary history of Kim Il Sung and the socialist utopia of the DPRK, eventually leading to the publication of the Treatise on Art as the summation of North Korean art theory. A close reading of the Treatise on Art and other state-produced art theoretical writings from the 1980s and thereafter reveals the undeniable influence of the Soviet Union on North Korean art theory through the adoption of socialist realism. Indeed, on the visual level the commonly recognizable characteristics of Soviet socialist realist paintings are found throughout North Korean paintings—the glorification of harvest, industry, and happiness set within a socialist utopia. At the same time, North Korean art theoretical writings uncover a keen desire to differentiate North Korean art theory from that of the Soviet Union through localization. At the core of North Korean paintings from the 1980s and afterward under the direction of Kim Jong Il is the application of a new art theory called juche realism, a term that first appeared in the Treatise on Art in 1992. While derived from socialist realism, juche realism responds to needs specific to North Korea in both medium and content; it is through these two elements that socialist realism is localized in North Korea. While the Treatise on Art encompasses painting, sculpture, publication art, craft, architectural decorative art, cinema and stage art, industrial art, and calligraphy, the text highlights the medium of painting. Chosŏnhwa, the traditional East Asian style of ink painting, is considered the foundation for North Korean art from which all art must develop. Juche realism’s second element of localization is the elevation of the emotive element of art and the “truthful” depiction of reality as the criterion for the creation of juche art. In fact, the essence of juche realism is found in the concept of truthfulness, a concept that is created by modifying the rhetorical framework underpinning socialist realism in the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China. By examining how the rhetorical framework of socialist realism changed in North Korea by localizing medium and content, this article argues that truthfulness encapsulated emotional truth rather than factual accuracy. To do so, this article limits the analysis to painting, a two-dimensional medium that is part of a wider cultural production, and to the period from 1985 onward, when the discourse leading to the development of juche realism gained traction in art theoretical writings in North Korea. Moreover, this article does not analyze all aspects of painting, such as, among others, the biography of artists and painterly technique. Instead, the focus is on the concept of truthfulness and its expression through the choice of subject matter and composition in three paintings from 1985 and 2000

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(two Chosŏnhwa and one oil). By analyzing these paintings, this article explores truthfulness as generated by the themes of revolutionary heroism, love for the motherland, and abundance to show how the concept visually articulated a North Korean socialist utopia.

Although it is difficult to ascertain when socialist realism first emerged in official North Korean art theoretical writings, it appears as far back as the January 1956 issue of Chosŏn misul (Korean Art), the foremost state-produced art journal of the time. After viewing the 1955 National Art Exhibition, the principal art exhibition of North Korea, influential art historian Han Sangjin wrote an article for the journal about the progress art had made in the revolutionary struggle for national reconstruction after the Korean War as demonstrated through the selected Chosŏnhwa. He praised the advancements made in the field of art, which “raised high the banner of Socialist Realism and fully absorbed its ideology and artistry” to become an art that spoke to the party, the working class, and the people. 1 He further declared, “I have seen a new aspect of Chosŏnhwa that is fully based on the method of Socialist Realism through this art exhibition.” 2 It is highly probable that socialist realism had already been introduced to the field of art much earlier than Han’s article, however. Initiated in late 1945, the Korean-Soviet Culture Society (Cho-Sso Munhwa Hyŏphoe) served as an important vehicle for cultural exchanges between the Soviet Union and North Korea during the years after Korea’s liberation from Japan. The organization’s journal, Cho-Sso ch’insŏn (Korea-Soviet Friendship), published articles on Soviet-style socialism and culture and introduced Korean translations of Soviet literary works. 3 In early 1949, North Korean art and artists were brought to the Soviet Union to further develop cultural exchanges between the two countries. 4 Another fruitful Soviet-DPRK artistic exchange was the dispatch of Pyŏn Wŏllyong, a Soviet Korean and professor of art at the Repin Institute, to the DPRK from July 1953 to August 1954. During his one-year tenure, he exposed North Korean artists to the theory and techniques of socialist realism. 5 Socialist realism was embraced by Kim Il Sung as part of the overarching Soviet cultural influence on North Korea from the late 1940s to the mid-1950s. At the Soviet Writers’ Congress in 1934, socialist realism was born from the need to localize Marxism for a specific, local political system. As Frank Hoffmann points out, socialist realism was designed to be a tool for mass manipulation for the Soviet Union, which was regarded as a non-Western locality. 6 Maxim Gorky, credited as the founder of socialist realism, wove these two elements of localization and mass manipulation into a speech on Soviet literature at the 1934 Writers’ Congress in the following terms:

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EMBRACING SOCIALIST REALISM, READING ITS LANGUAGE

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According to Gorky, myth is an invention that is manipulated to create a revolutionary outlook that changes the world. Socialist realism thus takes an active rather than passive approach to bring about beneficial results. In his speech, Gorky goes on to denounce the early modernist movement, which he believed was disconnected from the Soviet Union, since it pertained only to the bourgeoisie of Western Europe. For Gorky, the Soviet Union was outside the boundaries of Western Europe, positioned in what Hoffmann calls “an alternative locality” outside the West. 8 Gorky believed that the Soviet Union, as an “alternative locality,” was different culturally, historically, geographically, and politically from the West. Therefore, Marxism needed to be localized to meet the demands of a local political system—to manipulate reality in the arts for a political purpose. 9 Socialist realism is commonly referred to as a “method” that began in the field of literature and subsequently spread to the arts. In his text on Soviet socialist realism, C. Vaughan James defines the term as “art colored by the experience of the working class in its struggle to achieve socialism,” 10 based on his interpretation of Soviet texts on socialist realism. As laid out in the texts translated by James, socialist realism is grounded in the relationship between art and reality to build a new society. Art reflects reality, but it also affects that reality by changing it (89). To create a new society, a true reflection of reality in the arts is needed in the form of “artistic truth,” which raises communist awareness and makes possible an education rooted in communism. In essence, a true reflection of reality expresses the totality of communist ideals (89). The key term, artistic truth, is not specifically defined in James’s texts. Instead, the texts clarify only what the term does not describe—photographic art or naturalism, correct propositions, or formalism. A clear distinction between socialist realism and formalism is made where the latter is regarded as subjective, its reflection of reality distorted. Formalism is condemned for its lack of objective truth, which leads to the absence of artistic truth (90). Therefore, formalism is antithetical to socialist realism. According to this line of reasoning, artistic truth is not subjective; it must possess objective truth. Moreover, although artistic truth lacks a distorted reflection of reality, it is not a direct replication of physical reality. A contradiction pervades this convoluted reasoning behind the definition of artistic truth. If artistic truth is indeed a form of objective truth that lacks distortion, then how is it not a direct replication of physical reality? This contradiction is not addressed in the Soviet texts translated by James. Instead, the contradiction

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Myth is an invention. To invent means to extract from the sum of a given reality its cardinal idea and embody it in imagery—that is how we got realism. But if to the idea extracted from the given reality we add—completing the idea, by the logic of hypothesis—the desired, the possible, and thus supplement the image, we obtain that romanticism which is at the basis of myth and is highly beneficial in that it tends to provoke a revolutionary attitude to reality, an attitude that changes the world in a practical way. 7

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deepens with the discussion of the necessity of revolutionary romanticism in socialist realist art. To build a new society, revolutionary activity is required, which in turn requires that revolutionary romanticism be embedded into socialist realist art. According to James’s translation, “Socialist Realism embodies the ‘pathos’ of the creation of a new society and of the vision that urges people on” (91). That is, to build a new society toward communism, art that expresses emotion through monumental characters is required (91). Socialist realism is thus emotive; it must evoke emotion in its viewers through revolutionary romanticism to give birth to a new, communist society. Artistic truth, then, utilizes the mode of revolutionary romanticism to create an emotional truth. Revolutionary romanticism and its mobilization to create an emotional truth can be traced back to the Romantic French history paintings that emerged during the nineteenth century. According to Beth S. Wright, during the French Restoration, the dramatic personification of history was employed in history paintings to create a convincing historical narrative in support of the Bourbon monarchy. “Dramatic,” Wright explains, refers mostly to the gestural vocabulary of paintings, which conveys the effects of staging and theatrics. 11 When the subsequent French Revolution of 1848 led to a massive production of battle paintings, the republican state demanded that these paintings meet an ideological need by being more documentary and celebratory in nature. 12 Yet ironically, despite advocating a more documentary style, fictitious elements were deemed more realistic, due to their picturesque effects, than literal interpretations of battle scenes. 13 Highly emotionalized renderings of historical events that veered from factual accuracy sought to create a new vision that would move and galvanize the people. In the midtwentieth century, Henri Lefebvre championed a new revolutionary romanticism as an aesthetic idea for Western anticapitalist movements outside the party-form that was a variation of its predecessor. Lefebvre argued that everyday life needed to be revolutionized to fulfill the possible of tomorrow, of the future, ultimately of utopia.14 According to Lefebvre, modern life led to spiritual poverty, the everyday emasculated of its power and stripped of its creative potential. 15 Thus, for Lefebvre, the everyday was an oppressive system under which the people were subjugated, warranting a radical transformation. To materialize this transformation, artists searched for “true values,” leading them to imagination, “into the realm of make-believe” to refashion existence. 16 This transformation could be achieved not through everyday life but only with the aid of revolutionary romanticism. 17 The everyday as a concept, as argued by Suzy Kim, is a modern idea, “a product of capitalist modernity in the juxtaposition of the mundane and the eventful.” 18 In social revolutions, the everyday, Kim contends, serves as a stage where the “extraordinary eventfulness” of the revolution is displayed and as the foundation for old structures to be eradicated to make way for the new. 19 During revolutions, destructiveness accompanies creativity, where everyday life becomes the site of creative transformation, leading to what Hannah Arendt calls the “new beginning.”20 For those under colonial rule, this new beginning is an alternative reality

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If we were to remove Socialist Realism—novels about enthusiasm in industry, poems about the joy of labor, films about the happy life, songs and pictures about the wealth of the land of the Soviets, and so on—from our mental image of “socialism,” we

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marked by a political consciousness colored with an anti-imperialist fervor. Walter Benjamin witnessed the burgeoning of this alternative reality during his travels to Russia in 1928, reflecting on the participation of the masses in the politics of daily life, giving the everyday spontaneity and meaning. 21 The socialist everyday, the alternative reality, is thus characterized by participatory politics. 22 Socialist realism with an infusion of revolutionary romanticism is a means for the creation of the alternative reality, the “heroic modernism” of which David Harvey speaks. 23 In North Korea, Minister of Education Paek Namun observed a keen awareness of the link between the everyday and the arts during his travel to the Soviet Union in 1949. He stated, “Everyday life is connected to the arts, and it is the highest civilizational life and the happiest in the world in terms of making life artistic.” 24 It is through socialist realism’s affective power that the alternative reality is created, making life artistic and investing the cultural products produced with agency. In fact, it is this affective power that rallies the people to participate in the socialist everyday. Socialist realism’s affective power is illumined by the relationship between art and reality at its heart. This relationship crystallizes the visualization of an emotional truth that conveys values rather than factual accuracy through the terms artistic truth and revolutionary Romanticism. Yet this phenomenon is not unique to socialist realism. As observed by Louis Arnaud Reid, art imparts a lesson on values by illuminating a form of truth based not on scientific analysis but on what he calls “experiential knowledge.” 25 Experiential knowledge is about emotion. It is about experiencing, feeling, and knowing life in ways never before experienced. Feeling and knowing are united to create an “abstracted truth.” It is only when one has felt that one can know. Abstracted truth is not based on common sense or science. Instead, it is derived from feeling, seeing, and envisioning. It is experiential and therefore subjective. Through this experience, a new reality is created, one that gives form to values, opening new insights about and possibilities for the world. This is the kernel of art’s experiential knowledge that Reid set forth. With this experiential knowledge, the world is viewed, judged, and understood in new ways. 26 Art is therefore a possibility for something else, an alternative reality that may be radically different from the present one, the everyday. 27 A formula conceived by Evgeny Dobrenko provides clear guidelines on how to apply the abstract terms underpinning socialist realism to art production. Dobrenko argues that socialism did not produce socialist realism to “prettify reality.” Arguing in the context of Stalinism, he instead flips the statement to argue that socialist realism produced socialism, giving socialism material form and elevating it to reality. The foundation of socialist realism, he contends, is to aesthetically produce reality. 28 He describes how this process works as follows:

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It was through the arts that socialist realism produced socialism, flooding the Soviet landscape with cultural products expressing themes such as enthusiasm in industry, the joy of labor, the happy life, and the wealth of the Soviet Union. Through these visual and textual representations, socialism was given form. Without the symbolic values captured in the arts, socialism could not exist. The byproduct of this process was the creation of an alternative reality, the derealizing of the everyday. Utilizing the Marxist formula of “Goods—Money—Goods,” Dobrenko replaced th...