Juche Realism: North Korean Art.

In today’s post, which is Part 1 of two posts, I’m going to discuss the kind of art that is mandatory in the People’s Democratic Republic of Korea.

It’s called Juche Realism. Here are some examples:

Jo Jong-Man, ’After Securing Arms’, watercolor on paper, 1970s. Depicting a heroic episode from the Korean War. (Image via cctv-america.com)

Park Ryong Sam, ‘Farewell’, 1977. watercolour on paper. Another Korean War narrative. (Image via https://www.widewalls.ch/magazine/north-korean-art)

Unknown ‘The Year of Shedding Bitter Tears’, Fragment 2, c.1994, watercolor on paper. This collectively painted work was made to commemorate the death of Kim Il-sung in 1994. (Image-grab from Yoon, Min-Kyung, “Reading North Korea through Art’, Border Crossings. North and South Korean Art from the Sigg Collection, ex. cat., Hatje Kantz/Kunstmuseum Bern, 2021)

A totalitarian ideology, Hannah Arendt wrote, “differs from a simple opinion in that it claims to possess either the key to history, or the solution for all the ‘riddles of the universe,’ or the intimate knowledge of the hidden universal laws, which are supposed to rule nature and man."  In the DPRK, the inevitable non-realisation of the prophecy meant that as in the Soviet Union, which installed Kim Il-sung in power, Kim was soon obliged to devise strategies for cushioning the masses from the realities of failure and the oppression of authoritarian rule. But as was the case in Stalinist Russia, Kim realized that it wasn’t necessary to strive to make real external conditions match ideological goals; it was only necessary to change how the masses experienced external conditions by censoring all dissenting views and veiling day-to-day reality by a fantasy world created by artistic means, a fantasy world whose content derived wholly from the state-generated mythology.  

As I discussed in a previous post (June 21st, 2020, ‘North Korea: ‘Theater State’), the DPRK has developed a complex system of rituals in which the public space becomes a theatre in which allotted roles are played by all North Koreans. The entire population is regularly called upon to perform in the fantasy ‘total work of art’, in which actions are determined by externalized modes of interaction. Life is thereby ‘aestheticized’ by turning it into something to be enacted rather than acted upon, and the real locus of social life is the public not the private space. The North Korean people become submissive performers of a fabricated life, rather than free and self-determining agents in a real one. This is perhaps most explicitly demonstrated in the annual Arirang Games, which involve elaborate displays of huge numbers of people working in precise unison in synchronized movements. It is also evident in the extraordinary spectacles of collective mourning that followed the deaths of Kim Il-sung in 1994 and his son Kim Jong-Il in 2011.   Such ritualized mourning was emotional expression on the collective level and unrelated to individual psychology.  

Vasily Sergeyevich Orlov, ‘Native Land’, 1930s, oil on canvas. An example of Soviet socialist Realism, the model for North Korean Juche Realism. (Image: https://www.widewalls.ch/magazine/socialist-realism-art)

Art plays an important role in organizing and directing the state ‘performance.’ Like Soviet Socialist Realism upon which Juche Realism is based, such as the example shown above, painting in the DPRK is characterized by narrative allegories in the style of illustrational figuration - ‘illustrational’ in the sense that a clear message is unambiguously communicated. It is, in effect, a perverted form of nineteenth century History Painting, involving the staging of significant narratives for dramatic effect. But while North Korea’s artistic culture was initially merely imitative of Soviet Socialist Realism, it soon displayed significant signs of deviation to bring it into line with the more general deviation from Marxism-Leninism in state ideology. This was defined as ‘Kimilsungism’, and later, as ‘Kimilsungism-Kimjongilism’, after his son, Kim Jong Il became leader. 

Kimilsungism was formulated for the Korean people uniquely, and involves a transferral of political focus from the international to the national level, and a rhetorical shift from expressions of class unity and struggle to the unity of the North Korean people. Central to the new doctrine is the uniquely North Korean concept of juche, which derives etymologically from ju, meaning ‘the main principle’, and che, ‘body’ or ‘self’. The compound word is therefore usually interpreted as referring to ‘sovereign autonomy,’ ‘self-determination,’ or, most commonly, ‘self-reliance.’ As a political philosophy, ‘Juche thought’ was largely designed for foreign consumption, and intended to bring the regime an aura of political legitimacy and profundity. But the principals of ‘juche’ nevertheless informed the visual aesthetics of North Korean art, contributing to its salient characteristics, and determining how it differed in terms of technical media, themes, and mood from the Soviet model. 

In 1966 Kim Il-sung delivered a speech entitled ‘Let Us Develop Revolutionary Fine Arts’ in which he sought to distinguish Korean-style Socialist Realism and introduced the concept of 'Juche Realism'. His son and heir Kim Jong Il subsequently codified the principles in a book entitled On Fine Art (1991). While the outlook of Soviet Socialist Realism was intentionally international, Juche Realism was fundamentally nationalistic, forging an inseparable link between individual North Koreans, the people as a unified community, and the state based on the ideal of national autonomy. At first, in emulation of the Soviet Union, the western materials of oil on canvas were dominant media, and while they continued to remain important North Korean artists from the late 1950s were trained onward in a style dubbed Joseonhwa (or Chosonhwa) - Joseon-painting or DPRK painting (‘Joseon’ is how North Korea refers to itself). What makes Joseonhwa distinctive is not so much a deviation in figurative style from the basic conventions of Socialist Realism, however, but a change in the media employed: ink or colored water-based paints on paper. These are the traditional painting media of East Asia (China, Japan, and Korea), and the decision to adopt and adapt them was as a practical display of ‘Juche’ enacted on the level of technique, of relying on indigenous resources and conventions rather than foreign ones. But this decision also aimed to be a critique of the local tradition. For, in contrast to the literati or scholar-nobility conventions of pre-modern Korea, which derived from China and favoured monochromatic works in ink on paper or silk, Joseonhwa paintings are made in bright colours. 

Three main narrative themes in Juche Realism can be identified, which to some extent parallel those of Soviet Socialist Realism:  the triumph of heroism over adversity; love of the leader and the nation; and abundance in food production. As such, prominent subjects in Juche Realism are scenes of individual and group acts of heroism and courage, particularly related to the life of Kim Il-sung as a guerrilla fighter in the insurgency against the Japanese in China during the 1930s and 1940s, and during the Korean War (which according to the DPRK narrative, had been started by the ROK and ended in DPRK victory). These scenes also feature ordinary male and female soldiers and depict the overcoming of great obstacles through heroic and superhuman effort. The second typical theme concerns the expression of the tender, paternal, love of the Kim leadership for the North Korean people, and the reciprocal affection of the people for their leader. Third, there is the theme of abundance in food production, exemplified, for example, by paintings of Kim Il-sung visiting collective farms. In this case, the goal is to demonstrate that under benign leadership the DPRK possesses a perfectly efficient infrastructure that binds all sectors, providing not just communal sustenance by abundant flourishing.  

At the heart of Juche Realism lies a kind of “revolutionary romanticism”,  which especially emphasises pathos. The aim is to instruct the North Korean people in how to see, feel, and internalize the historical truth as presented by the DPRK’s ideology, thereby gaining mass compliance through emotionally moving the people via the representation of inspiring, comforting, and confidence-boosting tableaux with which they can readily empathize and use as models of correct behaviour to emulate and mimic. Images express affirmative feelings which demonstrate that the leader has the capacity to overcome all adversity and to continuously give birth to the new society. Juche Realism creates an imaginary “alternative reality”, one whose goal, as the art historian Min-Kyung Yoon puts it, is the “visualization of an emotional truth that conveys values rather than factual accuracy.” These emotional truths become the basis for historical truth.  Thus, the idea of ‘truth’ is epistemologically flattened and conflated with the official narrative controlled and disseminated by the regime, which admits no heterodoxy or challenges by parties outside the regime. 

So, the world Juche Realism evokes is an illusion beyond realization in the material world, and while it employs the conventions of mimetic realism, it is not involved in recording reality but in producing it.  In this sense, Juche Realism is performative rather than descriptive. Paintings are visual texts made up of signs whose power to influence occurs primarily on the level of affect, feeling, and emotion rather than discursively as conscious and rational reflection. Because of the monopoly over representation possessed by Juche Realism it functions as a powerful source of mimetic social behaviour. Indeed, no other sources of mimetic behaviour are available. The North Korean people thus are compelled to uniquely imitate the idealized conduct, actions, and practices that are depicted, and in a feedback loop this behaviour is consolidated and duplicated in everyday life.  It is this mimetic circle that creates the bridge between the fictive world of representation and the actual world of social interaction. Furthermore, the idealized nature of the behaviour guarantees that mimetic behaviour takes place despite actual, real-world, evidence that contradicts the idealization. The result is that a situation is produced in which elevated emotional such as self-esteem, reduced anxiety and depression, and a general sense of well-being are encouraged and channelled toward the maintenance of the status quo. 

Juche Realism functions as a pedagogy of submission. It helps construct  a social myth that shields the North Korean people from uncertainty, expressing the guarantee that under the Kim leadership they are safe from all danger. Through their status as performers within the state ritual, they receive a positive sense of collective power, efficacy, and confidence. In existential terms, Juche Realism facilitates the goal of the DPRK’s authoritarianism, which is to engineer the mass relocation of agency from the individual to the collective, and thereby to the state. Juche Realism aids and abets the process wherein the individual is radically deconstructed to become an integral part of a collective and eternal socio-political ‘organism’. 

Juche Realism should therefore be distinguished from propaganda, if by this term one only refers to the purveyance of biased or misleading information.  For in Juche Realism the ancient wish-fulfilling power of the image, which binds art to sacred ritual and supernatural belief, has been carried over into a secular system. Juche Realism is a form of transformational imagery which is part of the wider ritual process that channels the supernormal or extramundane powers purportedly embodied in the reigning ideology. Juche Realism is therefore fundamentally different from secular western humanistic art whose conventions of figuration it appropriates, linking it to a pre-modern worldview in which the image is a powerful talismanic presence to be utilized within communal rituals of piety and devotion. The cultic dimension of Juche Realism is most obvious in the reverence shown toward the portraits of the Kim leadership, which are treated like sacred icons - especially portraits of Kim Il-sung, who is worshipped as provider, healer, and saviour. 

In my next post, Part 2, I will think about Juche Realism’s success in creating a consoling aura of delusional optimism that serves to pacify the North Korean people..