the Mansudae Art Museum
The North Korean pavilion at the Shanghai World’s Fair was inspiring, but last week I discovered the Mansudae Art Museum in 798 just across from Pace Beijing. The current signage in 798 can’t be missed, and although a stop in to this spacious museum might cause most visitors to smirk at its “kitschy” socialist realist oils and statues with chiseled, idealized proletariat features, there were some artistic treasures within after all. The museum itself seems to be privately funded by one of the DPRK’s most enterprising cultural firms, the Mansudae Art Studio, whose “overseas projects” division is responsible for other monumental statues across Africa, including the controversial Senegalese “African Renaissance.” Look for the Mansudae Museum underneath the book-bearing youth astride a winged horse and crowning an enormous faux-brick pedestal.
Deferring comment on the works themselves, and not knowing enough about the context in which they arrived in China’s most prominent arts district, I’d rather tell you about my joyous discovery of other art within––DPRK stamps! While “Korean jewel painting” and the realist ink and wash landscapes depicting craggy mountains might not appeal to Western tastes, I don’t know who could resist the wonderfully rendered ratus norvegicous found on the pleasingly designed “Rodents” sheet of stamps.
Amidst political themes fawning on the P.R.C. (a plethora of stamps depict Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai, and more recent visits by the “dear Leader” to China), there was also a fascinating visual interpretation of the “History of the Earth” in which the planet swells like a bubble, and a equally reality-bending 1997 skyline view of Hong Kong, surely a commemoration of her return to Chinese rule. Mushrooms and alpine life sit high on the list of muses for DPRK philatelic society artists, and in the small books for sale inside the museum (13-31RMB), you can find their issue date in both the Western calendar, and in the Juche year (0 = 1912, the year of Kim Il-sung’s birth).
Had to post this great comment from Ralph Mackiewicz on FB:
Life imiitates art:
I was intrigued by the secret camp of the great leader Kim Jong Il so I looked up Mt. Paektu and I found it on a NASA site:
http://eol.jsc.nasa.gov/sseop/EFS/lores.pl?PHOTO=ISS006-E-43366… See More
I never would have guessed that he born in a “secrtet volcano lair” just like Dr. Evil!!
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