[KS] Socialist surrealism :-)

[Frank Hoffmann]

"Creepy, really, really creepy" comments BaddHamster, while 
irishmaninholland calls it "Socialist surrealism," adding a smiley.

Have a look at Oliver Wainwright's (the Guardian's architecture and 
design critic) article "Propaganda artists from North Korea paint a 
rose-tinted China" in yesterday's issue of the British Guardian. (Ever 
since Snowden they reach new heights.)

............
"Propaganda artists from North Korea paint a rose-tinted China" by 
Oliver Wainwright
http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2013/oct/17/china-north-korean-propaganda-paintings
(October 17, 2013)
............

The not-anymore-so-new North Korean export of its artistic design 
services to say Namibia and several other poor Third World countries 
(like Germany, to be sure), was nicely covered by Aidan Foster-Carter's 
and Kate Hext's text in Rüdiger Frank's 2011 _Exploring North Korean 
Arts_ volume. But this determines yet another "stage" in that now North 
Korean artists, unnamed in the above article, are producing modernist, 
contemporary art. Creepy in several ways, in the sense also that North 
Korea simply does not have any contemporaneity. One of the commenters 
to this Guardian article writes: "The article is kind of vague on 
exactly how these images were made. Did the Pyongyang artists work from 
verbal descriptions or sketches? Is there an exhibition of these 
paintings in a Beijing gallery?" (Dennis J.R. Sweeney) That was my 
question too, and so I phreaked the Interweb, and it told me that yes, 
there was, by the said Nick Bonner, whom we all know by now:
http://www.design-china.org/post/62189969036/the-beautiful-future
Koryo Studio website about the exhibit:
http://koryogroup.com/blog/?p=2087
So, congratulations to Nick again! He keeps things rotating the other 
way around, and that is great to see and is in my view so much more 
meaningful and enlightening than a sack of finger-pointing political 
analysts. This is really new, since this time it is not some South 
Korean (and/or ex-North Korean) artist playing with the North Korean 
stereotypical subject matters, designs, and icons. This is an active 
cooperation between modernist artists (Nick and Dominic, in this case) 
with North Korean artists, producing highly relevant on-the-edge 
images. At the same time one wonders if the makers of the 
"hand-painted" (quote from exhibition poster) images where in any way 
aware of what they were doing there, and how aware they could have 
been. That is secondary though.


All hand-typed and original black bits and bytes on white space,
Frank


--------------------------------------
Frank Hoffmann
http://koreanstudies.com