Above the ballooning dress of Marilyn Monroe is the face of the late North Korean leader Kim Jong-il. A pigeon flies overhead and a feather lies nearby on the ground.
North Korean artist Song Byeok once proudly drew the “Dear Leader” in propaganda paintings, but he was sent to labor in one of the reclusive state’s notorious prisons after hunger forced him to try to flee.
Now a defector living in Seoul, South Korea, Song has turned to mocking a ruler who led his country into famine, isolation and economic ruin.
Photo: Reuters
“The day I finished this, he passed away,” Song said of his painting and the death of Kim on Dec. 17.
“He’s not an eternal creature, but the same as the feather of a pigeon,” Song said, using the feather to symbolize something inconsequential. “I thought it would’ve been better if he made North Koreans better off and forget hunger before he died.”
Kim, who was 69 when he died, was a patron of the arts in his hermit kingdom and at times went to extreme means to promote the arts.
He once kidnapped a South Korean film director and forced him to make movies for him. Kim amassed a big hoard of South Korean movies on DVD and commissioned works of art.
Song never had a sitting with Kim, the second member of a dynasty that has ruled North Korea since its birth in 1948.
Every morning, he was handed a sketch of whatever piece of propaganda the state wanted illustrated that day.
“How could I, just a commoner, meet Kim Jong-il? He is the sun,” the 42-year-old painter and sculptor said.
Song, like most other North -Koreans, practically worshiped Kim and before that, his father, North Korean founder Kim Il-sung.
However, starvation, a result of chronic mismanagement and natural disasters, changed that. After floods in the late 1990s, conditions deteriorated to the point of desperation.
In August 2000, Song and his father, driven by hunger, tried to swim across the Tumen River to China in the hope of getting food from relatives there.
However, his father was swept away in the swollen river and Song was caught and sent to a labor camp, the North Korean equivalent of the Soviet-era gulags, where the human rights group Amnesty International says 200,000 people are forced to work with little food and under threat of execution.
In the freezing Korean winter, Song recalls he was as lightly dressed as when he was arrested in summer.
A finger on his right hand became infected and eventually he says he was so close to death that his captors could get no work out of him and released him.
However, Song was determined to try to get out and in 2002, leaving his mother and sister behind, he made it and ended up in Seoul. After his mother died in 2005, he brought his sister and her family out in 2007 with the help of a broker in China.
“If we had had enough to eat, I would have not come,” Song said.
Despite losing his finger, Song took up his brush again. Some of his paintings now show hollow-eyed North Korean girls and smiling, homeless children, known in the North as “fluttering swallows,” surrounding Kim Jong-il.
As for “Great Successor” Kim Jong-un, Song said that for now, he has no plan to paint him.
“He’s too young and I don’t want to say yet,” Song said.
‘IN A DIFFERENT PLACE’: The envoy first visited Shanghai, where he attended a Chinese basketball playoff match, and is to meet top officials in Beijing tomorrow US Secretary of State Antony Blinken yesterday arrived in China on his second visit in a year as the US ramps up pressure on its rival over its support for Russia while also seeking to manage tensions with Beijing. The US diplomat tomorrow is to meet China’s top brass in Beijing, where he is also expected to plead for restraint as Taiwan inaugurates president-elect William Lai (賴清德), and to raise US concerns on Chinese trade practices. However, Blinken is also seeking to stabilize ties, with tensions between the world’s two largest economies easing since his previous visit in June last year. At the
Nearly half of China’s major cities are suffering “moderate to severe” levels of subsidence, putting millions of people at risk of flooding, especially as sea levels rise, according to a study of nationwide satellite data released yesterday. The authors of the paper, published by the journal Science, found that 45 percent of China’s urban land was sinking faster than 3mm per year, with 16 percent at more than 10mm per year, driven not only by declining water tables, but also the sheer weight of the built environment. With China’s urban population already in excess of 900 million people, “even a small portion
UNSETTLING IMAGES: The scene took place in front of TV crews covering the Trump trial, with a CNN anchor calling it an ‘emotional and unbelievably disturbing moment’ A man who doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire outside the courthouse where former US president Donald Trump is on trial has died, police said yesterday. The New York City Police Department (NYPD) said the man was declared dead by staff at an area hospital. The man was in Collect Pond Park at about 1:30pm on Friday when he took out pamphlets espousing conspiracy theories, tossed them around, then doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire, officials and witnesses said. A large number of police officers were nearby when it happened. Some officers and bystanders rushed
Beijing is continuing to commit genocide and crimes against humanity against Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in its western Xinjiang province, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a report published on Monday, ahead of his planned visit to China this week. The State Department’s annual human rights report, which documents abuses recorded all over the world during the previous calendar year, repeated language from previous years on the treatment of Muslims in Xinjiang, but the publication raises the issue ahead of delicate talks, including on the war in Ukraine and global trade, between the top U.S. diplomat and Chinese