After Fleeing North Korea, an Artist Parodies Its Propaganda

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IN one of Sun Mu’s best-known paintings from his “Happy Children” series, uniformed North Korean kindergartners sing like birds huddled together on a clothesline, their beaming faces so alike they could be clones. At the bottom of the posterlike image, a red slogan leaps out against a yellow background: “We are all happy children!”

When Sun Mu, an artist from North Korea who uses a pseudonym for security reasons, first exhibited paintings like this in Seoul two years ago, the police showed up to investigate. They had been tipped off by viewers who, missing the intended irony, were upset by what they took to be Communist propaganda — a possible crime under South Korea’s national security laws. After all, rapturously smiling child performers are a familiar feature of North Korean pageants, and the style mimics posters celebrating the North’s authoritarian regime.

“I’m not pro-Communist, far from it,” said Sun Mu, 36, who fled North Korea in 1998 to escape famine and arrived in the South in 2001. “When people look at my paintings, I hope they can hear the children asking, ‘Do you really think we’re happy?’ ”

Sun Mu, who was trained to create posters and murals for the Communist government, is the first defector from the North to have won fame as a painter in the South by applying that same propagandistic style to biting parodies of the North Korean regime.

His renown, however, is shaded by political concerns. In addition to adopting a pseudonym, he refuses to allow his face to be photographed, afraid that the family he left behind might face reprisals for his art. South Korean news outlets often refer to him as the “faceless” or “nameless” artist from North Korea.

His work has not always been well received.

Soon after his arrival in 2001 he enrolled at Hongik University, a leading arts institution in Seoul, where his socialist-realist technique put him at odds with prevailing notions of what constituted art. One of his professors called his political imagery “cheap, fit for old barbershops” — a reference to the cold war years when South Korean barbershops often were decorated with crude propaganda posters with slogans like “Let’s exterminate Communists!”

Now, many here say that imagery, with its subverted content, addresses issues central to Korean identity. “His work touches the national trauma of the divided Korea,” said Kim Dong-il, a visual arts critic and lecturer at Sogang University in Seoul. “His style is North Korean, but when he brought it to South Korea it became something completely different. The children’s smiles in his paintings become too idealized to be real. A smile is not always an expression of happiness, and can even mean the opposite.”

Sun Mu’s paintings have also depicted his own fearful journey across the river border into China in 1998, and the plight of a shackled North Korean defector who was repatriated to North Korea from the same Laotian prison where he himself was detained before proceeding on to Thailand and eventually to South Korea.

So far, however, his signature work has been the “Happy Children” series, with its relentlessly smiling North Korean youngsters. The smile has been variously interpreted by commentators as grotesque, a joke on the collectivism of North Korea, or a mask to hide the helplessness many North Koreans feel.

SUN MU said he used to wear that smile himself. In North Korea, he and his classmates smilingly sang hymns to Kim Jong-il, the North Korean leader, and would march out to perform for soldiers and farmers toiling in the fields. “They teach you how to smile that regimented smile — there’s a certain way to shape your mouth,” he said. “We children thought we were happy. We didn’t realize that our smile was fabricated and manufactured.”

Later, while serving in the North Korean Army, Sun Mu was assigned to create propaganda paintings. He produced images of North Korean soldiers cutting the throats of American soldiers or crushing Japanese invaders.

“One of the rules was that South Korean puppet soldiers be depicted as small and inconsequential at the corner of the canvas and running away from North Korean soldiers,” he said with a chuckle. “We’d finish off our paintings by adding slogans like ‘Let’s defend our revolutionary leadership with our lives!’ ”

He was an art student in college when he decided to flee North Korea, during a famine in the late 1990s that is thought to have killed two million people.

SOME of the political satire in his current output is hard to miss. In one painting, a woman raising her middle finger is naked except for the North Korean flag slipping off her body. Nudity is strictly forbidden in the North, denounced as capitalist decadence.

Sun Mu paints something else he could never have dared to depict in the North: portraits of Mr. Kim and his father, North Korea’s founder, Kim Il-sung. In the North, portraits of the Kims are considered sacred, and only a few artists are authorized to paint them.

In any case, the official portraits would never look like these. In one, Kim Jong-il is dressed not in his trademark Mao-style suit but in a pink Nike sports jacket, red Adidas pants and mismatched running shoes. Mr. Kim is transformed from supreme leader to bourgeois loafer.

Nonetheless, displaying the Kims’ images has also proved controversial.

When Sun Mu presented a portrait of Kim Il-sung titled “Sun of Korea” at an international biennale last September in Pusan, the South Korean organizers removed it at the last minute, saying they wanted to avoid potential problems with a “pro-Communist” painting.

At an exhibition in 2007, South Korean viewers objected to a Sun Mu portrait of Kim Jong-il that carried the title “God of Korea.” They apparently did not notice that the North Korean flag in the background had been hung upside down.

Sun Mu is undeterred.

“I cannot help being political,” he said. “How can I ignore the reality of the North, where my parents are still suffering? I would like to believe that art can change the world in whatever little way it can.”

The New York Times

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