Fine Art

Contemporary Art in D.P.R. Korean

Korean art is strictly linked to its own tradition. North Korean artists are the direct witnesses and heirs of the immense cultural tradition of this country.
The exhibition is an attempt to create a contact with this mysterious and fascinating country, which is DPR Korea a unique culture in its own right.
DPR Korean art is the expression of a country where ideological art is an expression of the traditional art.

Korean art is an Oriental way of expressing art, but having a strong personality of its own different to its neighboring China or Japan.
The works have a historical importance, they are of a native sensibility and sometimes of a sincere trust typical of a country in many ways protected from the globalization that risk homogenizing and depersonalizing.
While Posters art unequivocally and forcefully presents political and ideological position, painting emphasizes tradition, full of motifs like landscapes, countryside, mountains, flowers and birds, the impressive tiger or lion (so naturalistic and richly coloured testifying the respect for these animals, important for the collective imagination), female figures with traditional clothes.

The North Korean master who draws from tradition does not imagine himself in front of the picture, but inside the picture. The peaks, the strong waterfall, the long mountain chains, the large landscapes show how man is only an element of the great and ineffable scenery of Nature.
The atmosphere inside the Arts Centre is based on reciprocal respect and solidarity, there are functional and artistic hierarchies, but everybody shares the space and the experience. The Centre is divided into departments and each of them is well equipped for the art genre it produces.

Their Leader’s wish has determined the course of North Korean contemporary painting. In the past the subjects were almost only political and social, and it was Kim Jong Il who said “that a picture must be painted in such a way that the viewer can understand its meaning. If the people who see a picture can’t grasp its meaning, they cannot say it is a good picture, no matter how talented is its creator”. As a consequence of that, in North Korea abstract or conceptual art does not exist.