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SPEAKER_05: They call it this coffee machine. I mean, it's like a coffee machine, whatever it is.
SPEAKER_04: It's the big golden coffee machine looking building on the hill. It stands five stories above the adjacent traffic circle, and it really does look a lot like a big industrial coffee maker that you'd find in a banquet hall.
SPEAKER_15: It's a huge gold and black cylinder on stilts with an empty space underneath. Two big glass elevators run up the legs. This sleek, ultra-modern building is a museum.
SPEAKER_06: That's reporter Ryan Lenora Brown.
SPEAKER_15: She's based in South Africa. It was built to commemorate Namibia's fight for independence from apartheid South Africa, which it achieved in 1990.
SPEAKER_06: And for many of the visitors I spoke with, the museum feels like a huge achievement.
SPEAKER_10: The artifacts, the statues, everything, the effort, like, it's a thumbs up for them. I'm really proud. Like, this is one of the places that I can say I'm proud of in my country.
SPEAKER_06: But for a museum that commemorates throwing off the chains of colonialism and forging a new era of self-determination, it has one pretty strange feature. It wasn't designed by a Namibian architect. It wasn't even designed by an African architect. Do you know who made this museum? I have no idea.
SPEAKER_06: It was North Korea. Is it? Good to know, actually. I will not forget that.
SPEAKER_15: Namibia's Independence Memorial Museum was imagined and built by North Korea's state-run design studio. In fact, North Korea is one of the most prolific builders of monuments around the world. The country has left a distinct visual stamp across Africa in particular.
SPEAKER_06: It's constructed museums and monuments in more than a dozen African countries since the 1970s.
SPEAKER_15: There's the African Renaissance statue in Dakar, Senegal that's taller than the Statue of Liberty and shows a family reaching triumphantly towards the sky. There's a futuristic mausoleum to the first president of Angola, so space-age, it's known locally as Sputnik. And in the Democratic Republic of Congo, there's a huge statue of former president Laurent Kavila. It stands on a base whose text just says, national hero, in all caps.
SPEAKER_06: There's a good chance you've seen North Korea's design work before, even if you didn't realize it. And the story of how North Korea came to be one of the world's leading exporters of statues and monuments goes back decades, to a moment when North Korea wasn't the paranoid and isolated hermit kingdom we think of today.
SPEAKER_15: Instead, it was a young socialist upstart on a diplomatic tour trying to prove itself to the world.
SPEAKER_06: Before World War II, Korea was a Japanese colony. After the war, the Allies took over the peninsula and divided it in two. It became one of the fronts of the Cold War. North Korea was backed by the Soviet Union and South Korea was occupied by the US.
SPEAKER_15: Each country saw itself as the rightful ruler of the entire peninsula. To prove their claim, both sides began a global PR blitz to show the world that they were the one true Korean nation. Basically, North and South Korea won a diplomatic competition for who could get the most recognition in international forums.
SPEAKER_14: That's Ben Young.
SPEAKER_06: He's a historian at Virginia Commonwealth University and the author of Guns, Gorillas, and the Great Leader, North Korea and the Third World.
SPEAKER_14: So they went to countries in the South Pacific, really small countries like Nauru or Tuvalu. But really the primary space where North Korea and South Korea competed for diplomatic recognition was in Africa.
SPEAKER_15: This was for a simple reason. Africa was emerging from a long era of European colonization. And as these new countries began to win their independence, they hadn't necessarily picked a side in the Cold War. And many were open to new alliances.
SPEAKER_06: For these newly independent African countries, North Korea had an appealing pitch, delivered by its leader, Kim Il-sung. He would show them how to be a modern, developed country that wasn't Western or white. North Korea had done it, and so could they.
SPEAKER_14: They have a lot of post-colonial officials and leaders and government ministers going to North Korea in the 1970s and 60s, talking about how much they saw North Korea as an admirable model of development, with its free and universal health care system, with its rapid industrialization, and also the fact that it was this independent state that didn't have foreign troops on their soil. What North Korea was offering to its potential African allies was a kind of independence starter kit.
SPEAKER_15: It was everything you'd need to build a country like they had, from military training and weapons, to factories and agricultural projects, and eventually, the statues and monuments you'd need to celebrate your triumph over colonialism.
SPEAKER_06: Which brings us back to Namibia, a country in southern Africa that became entangled with North Korea during its own independence struggle.
SPEAKER_15: Like the people of North Korea, Namibians had been victims of brutal colonial rule. First, the territory had been a German colony, called South West Africa. Then, in 1915, the territory came under South Africa's control. That was supposed to be a temporary arrangement, but South Africa took over and refused to let go.
SPEAKER_06: That meant that from the late 1940s onward, Namibia was ruled under South Africa's racist apartheid regime.
SPEAKER_15: Resistance to apartheid was met with violence, and by the early 1960s, anti-apartheid activists in both South Africa and what is now known as Namibia had decided that the only way forward was to take up arms themselves. Many of them fled into exile to train as soldiers.
SPEAKER_03: We need not only reading books, but also we have to learn how to use guns and liberate the Namibian people from the colonial rule. Mandume Mashiqua was in his early 20s when he joined the armed wing of Namibia's liberation movement.
SPEAKER_06: The movement received support from across the socialist world, and some soldiers spent time training in places like the Soviet Union and China. During Mandume's training, he was assigned to spend a year in a place he'd never heard much about, North Korea. And so one day he got on a plane and flew to Pyongyang, where it turned out his hosts were startled by him.
SPEAKER_15: Some were running away to see a black skin. Some are coming to touch. Even grown-up people say,
SPEAKER_03: what type of skin is that? To us, we were just laughing at them.
SPEAKER_06: From his North Korean teachers, Mandume learned to shoot a gun. He studied the differences between capitalism and communism. He trained as a farmer, and he learned to love spicy noodle soup.
SPEAKER_15: His hosts told him, you'll need to know all these things to run a modern socialist country one day. Maybe not the soup thing, but the rest of it. It was very advanced, and we said, ah, these people, they developed their country. We want to do the same thing.
SPEAKER_03: When we go back, we want to develop our country like this. If they do things like that, why not us?
SPEAKER_15: By the early 1970s, about 2,500 soldiers from across Africa had received training much like Mandume's. In Namibia, these soldiers joined a guerrilla war against the apartheid government. They planted mines and bombs and attacked military convoys. They blew up infrastructure like bridges, tunnels, and border posts. This war of sabotage was meant to wear down and isolate South Africa, one of the last white governments on the continent.
SPEAKER_06: North Korea was one of several socialist countries supporting armed liberation movements in Africa. And a lot of its support was what you'd expect, in the form of guns and military expertise. But the country was also establishing its African presence in less orthodox ways.
SPEAKER_15: North Korea's leader, Kim Il-sung, knew the crucial role that architecture and design could play in building a new nation. In North Korea, he had made the built landscape into a kind of giant open-air history lesson. There were murals, statues, and reliefs everywhere, in public squares and train stations. All the public art reinforced the story of the country's triumph over imperialism. And, of course, the glorious leader who led that fight.
SPEAKER_06: The epicenter for this kind of art in North Korea was a massive design studio located in Pyongyang. It was called Mansudae. The studio was founded in 1959, and it was part artist's colony, part factory, and all propaganda machine. Among Mansudae's greatest hits were a 65-foot-tall bronze statue of Kim himself, and a series of huge mosaics of the great leader displayed in Pyongyang's metro stations. In one, he is literally the sun, shining down over an imagined reunification of North and South Korea. These monuments were all done in a style called socialist realism.
SPEAKER_15: It's an artistic genre that started in the Soviet Union and was perfected in the Cold War communist world. And, despite the name, it's not really about representing reality. It's more about utopia, reality as you or your government would like it to be.
SPEAKER_06: Think Russian peasants striding joyfully through a sun-dappled wheat field, or Chairman Mao surrounded by a crowd of happy Chinese factory workers. North Korean artists became masters of the form, and artists, in turn, became a revered part of North Korean society.
SPEAKER_02: I think it's a great honor to be part of this project. In one word, it was joyous.
SPEAKER_11: We didn't create voluntarily, but we would get this paper with slogans that we have to paint. For example, let's show our loyalty for the Kim family. And then we would stay up all night to paint those slogans on the streets so that laborers can see them and be motivated to show their loyalty to the Kim family. That's Byuk Song. I spoke with him through a translator.
SPEAKER_06: Decades ago, he was a worker at a steel factory in the North Korean city of Songrim. He says that just for fun, he used to sometimes sketch his colleagues on their smoke breaks. One day, a party official saw his drawings and offered him a job making propaganda posters for the local government in that region. It was prestigious work.
SPEAKER_11: Because it's a work of praising the Kim family, we were looked at with a certain sense of pride. And also it wasn't manual labor. We worked with brushes. So other regular workers were envious. And my parents also took great pride in my work.
SPEAKER_15: For over a decade, Mansudae had focused on creating work for the great leader and in the process became a state-sponsored arts behemoth. It would eventually become a massive campus with more than 1000 working artists and its own soccer stadium, clinic, paper mill and kindergarten. Most of the country's best artists ended up there.
SPEAKER_06: But in the 1970s, around the same time Mandume Mashiqua was training in the North Korean military camp, the studio decided to expand its work into other parts of the world. It founded a division called Mansudae Overseas Projects. Now, North Korea wouldn't just be training and funding guerrilla fighters across Africa. They would also be designing monuments and memorials for their allies when they achieved liberation.
SPEAKER_15: This monument diplomacy was well received, especially because it was subsidized from start to finish by the North Korean government. Mansudae artists and architects designed these works in Pyongyang and then constructed them on site with their own crew of workers, all without the recipient country lifting a finger.
SPEAKER_06: But just as North Korea's statue exports were picking up, its fortunes as a country were plummeting. In the 1980s, the country's economy began to crash. South Korea was already pulling ahead when the North was dealt a near fatal blow. From ABC, this is World News Tonight with Peter Jennings.
SPEAKER_00: Reporting tonight from Berlin. From the Berlin Wall specifically, take a look at them. They've been there since last night. They are here in the thousands. They are here in the tens of thousands. Occasionally they shout, Die Mausweck, the wall must go. The Soviet Union fell and the Cold War ended.
SPEAKER_15: And in the process, North Korea lost its main sponsor and supporter. The North Koreans had always talked a big game about self-sufficiency. But the reality was that the country had always relied heavily on Soviet aid. And without it, they fell into crisis.
SPEAKER_06: The country's economy all but collapsed. And then, when it was hit with a series of natural disasters, people began to starve. The world increasingly saw North Korea as a pariah state, with a cruel and ruthless leader at the helm.
SPEAKER_15: Although the North Korean government refused most outside help, it was desperate for hard currency. And one of its few remaining exports, one of its last points of connection with the outside world, was its giant statues.
SPEAKER_14: Quite honestly, the only country that really does socialist realism is North Korea. That's historian Ben Young again.
SPEAKER_06: He says the big, bold theatrical style still had appeal, especially to young African countries trying to shape how people saw their history.
SPEAKER_14: If you're an African post-colonial nation, and you're looking for something that is decidedly non-Western, that is anti-colonial, you're going to be looking at the North Koreans. And the North Korean artists and sculptors, they're very talented and they also come cheap. This is the day for which tens of thousands of Namibian patriots laid down their lives.
SPEAKER_08: In 1990, Namibia finally negotiated its independence after more than a century of struggle,
SPEAKER_15: first under German and then South African rule. One of the leaders of its guerrilla movement, Sam Nyoma, became the first president. Today our hearts are filled with a great joy and a jubilation.
SPEAKER_09: But as with any country born out of a long struggle,
SPEAKER_06: Nyoma and other Namibian leaders faced a massive challenge in uniting people behind a new story about the nation. The history Namibians had received from their colonizers taught them every single day
SPEAKER_15: that they were inferior and uncivilized, a people without history. The narrative was right to the nation.
SPEAKER_05: That is the kind of history we have been given. That's Gerhard Gurirab, who grew up in pre-independence Namibia.
SPEAKER_06: Back then, history lessons focused on the great empires of Europe and the civilizing powers of white people in Africa. There were no counter-history.
SPEAKER_05: We didn't hear about liberation movements. So the kind of history there was indoctrination. And even in the new Namibia, that history loomed large.
SPEAKER_15: There were physical relics of colonialism everywhere in the form of old colonial buildings and colonial monuments. The Namibian government decided it was time to tell a new story,
SPEAKER_06: one centered on liberation. In 2001, Namibia's cabinet approved a plan to build a museum on the site of one of those colonial monuments. It was a deeply controversial statue of a German soldier called the Reiterdenkmal. The site had also been a concentration camp where Namibians were held by Germans in the early 1900s. And so the location of the new museum was symbolic. — A museum is not a neutral institution.
SPEAKER_05: It's a powerful institution to mold the mind of the people, to let them understand the message of the people. We have overcome the colonization of this country,
SPEAKER_05: and this is what we are.
SPEAKER_06: — Gurirab is also a historian, and would go on to become the museum's curator once it was built. — After considering a range of designs,
SPEAKER_15: the Namibian government chose North Korea's Mansudae to build the Independence Museum. The choice was in many ways a strange one. The new Namibia wasn't a socialist dictatorship. It was a democracy. The views on the world seemed almost diametrically opposed to those of North Korea.
SPEAKER_06: — But North Korea was also an old friend. During the Cold War, when many countries in the West, including the U.S., had worked against Namibian independence, North Korea had supported them. — During those dark days,
SPEAKER_05: North Korea was one of those countries which supported the liberation movements in Africa.
SPEAKER_06: — And in the new Namibia, Mansudae had already built a number of projects, including a memorial to heroes of the liberation struggle, a new presidential palace, a munitions factory, and a military museum.
SPEAKER_05: — So, looking from that background, our leaders have decided to ask the North Korean company to build the museum.
SPEAKER_06: — The museum opened on March 21, 2014, Namibian Independence Day. In front of it, almost exactly where the Rider-Dent Mall colonial statue once stood, was a huge statue of Namibia's first president, Sam Niyoma. His right arm was thrust towards the sky, holding a copy of Namibia's constitution.
SPEAKER_06: — Gerhard Gurirab gave me a tour of the Independence Memorial Museum. And at the start, I was feeling a bit skeptical. I'd seen images of Mansudae's other works in Africa. From a distance, a lot of them looked loud and kind of obvious, maybe a little bit tacky.
SPEAKER_05: — But it's one thing to see a photo of a giant Mansudae mural.
SPEAKER_06: It's totally different to be actually standing in front of one. And in the first gallery of the museum are two floor-to-ceiling paintings that immediately floored me.
SPEAKER_06: — The painting he's describing shows dozens, maybe hundreds of people, lined up in rows facing the viewer. Some are wearing uniforms and carrying magazines of ammunition. Others hold wooden spears. Each of them is painted in vivid, hyper-realistic detail. And the collective effect is striking. This is over a century of Namibian resistance, compressed into a single moment. — And this one's very important because when people walk in, this is going to be the very, very first thing they see. So what do you want people's impression to be when they just walk in and see this?
SPEAKER_05: — This is how our, let's say, ancestors, or first freedom fighters of this country look like.
SPEAKER_06: — The backbone of the museum are these giant, immersive Mansudae artworks, and some of them have a lot of violent and gruesome imagery. There's a gallery about the Namibian genocide. It was carried out by the Germans in the early 1900s, and the walls are indented with huge scratch marks that represent people's desperate attempts to escape from German concentration camps.
SPEAKER_05: — These scratches from men and women, and also of children which have been brutalized or killed during those days. — It's hard not to come away from these images
SPEAKER_06: with a sense of the incredible price that Namibia paid to be free. But as we move through the museum, the North Korean connection also starts to get more and more obvious.
SPEAKER_05: — We see here images of Dr. Sam Nyoma, president of North Korea.
SPEAKER_06: — So the one of North Korea is there in the center. — Yes. — It's in a gold frame. All the other ones are not framed. — Yes. — So they just put that one in the center like that. — And then finally, in the last room of the museum, is an image that I can only describe as very, very North Korean. There are 10 people in this mural.
SPEAKER_05: — This is a very important image for Namibia, after independence. This is how our people have been looking up. We can see all walks of life—our farmers, our brothers and sisters, our children, school-going pastors, the architects, main workers. — They're all facing a rainbow sun,
SPEAKER_06: which is emanating rays in the colors of the Namibian flag—red, green, and blue. Hovering above the entire image is the face of Namibia's great leader, Sam Nyoma. — Of course, yeah, because it is how we see ourselves now.
SPEAKER_05: Independent people looking up to the new dawn.
SPEAKER_06: — The image feels like heavy-handed propaganda. But you know what else does? Mount Rushmore. There's nothing more excessive than carving the heads of your favorite presidents into the side of a mountain. Patriotism lends itself to monumentalist art.
SPEAKER_05: — This is the new birth of a nation with the new symbols of nationalism. So that is what people really see when they leave this museum.
SPEAKER_06: — I think about what Gerhard Guryrob told me about his history classes growing up, where he was told again and again that he was primitive, that civilization had been given to him by white people. — Behind us in the museum are lots of young Namibians, browsing the exhibits, being told a very different story about who they are and where they come from.
SPEAKER_01: — I think mostly for me, it serves a reminder of what the ancestors did, you know, my forefathers, the fight. So I really like that in times where I feel like I'm not grateful enough for the freedom that I have, and coming here sort of just, you know, reminds me to be grateful.
SPEAKER_15: — The Independence Memorial Museum has clearly served an important purpose. It's helped reorient the story of Namibia around the struggle to be free. But less than a decade after opening, the museum is already starting to show signs of wear. Tiles are falling off the facade. The TV screens and many of the exhibits aren't working.
SPEAKER_06: And more people have started to ask questions about the building's provenance. North Korea is widely recognized as a country under a brutal and oppressive regime. In 2017, Mansudae Overseas Projects was one of four North Korean state-owned companies sanctioned by the UN. The intention was to deter North Korea from further expanding its nuclear weapons program. That largely ended Mansudae's reign as purveyors of socialist realist art around the world.
SPEAKER_15: And beyond that, there's a new generation of Namibians asking why such an important national institution wasn't built with more Namibian involvement. The museum shows its foreignness in big and small ways. — Well, the murals don't look Namibian at all.
SPEAKER_04: The people don't look Namibian. And it's very odd to look at. — This is Indenda Shivute Nakapunda, the curator of the National Art Gallery,
SPEAKER_06: which is a short walk from the Independence Museum. And she finds the images in the museum unsettling in a number of ways, starting with the basic fact that the people in the images look subtly North Korean. — Not that we've got one image, but they just don't look black.
SPEAKER_04: They don't have our artistic, you know, black features.
SPEAKER_15: — She also thinks the museum could have done more to integrate traditional Namibian architecture and design. And then there's also the story the museum tells. It feels gruesome and oversimplified, she says.
SPEAKER_04: — There's the blood, there are the decapitated bodies, there are the bombs, and then at the end you have that massive mural where, you know, there are people standing, sunshine, freedom, and flowers. It just feels like a school textbook, very simplified, kind of like, one, two, three, and then this is how it got to where we are.
SPEAKER_06: — But even so, young Namibians like Indenda are using the museum in ways that were probably not imagined by its designers. There's a word here for the generation of Namibians born after the end of apartheid—the Bornfries. Many older Namibians have a lifelong loyalty to the political leaders who led the liberation movement. But Bornfries are much more irreverent. And in recent years, they've been at the forefront of movements fighting corruption and advocating for LGBTQ rights. Some of these protests have taken place right at the foot of the enormous Samneoma statue in front of the museum. — And I find that very interesting because the protesters have been taking up that space at the staircase,
SPEAKER_04: with him towering over them.
SPEAKER_15: — One of the most important differences between putting up this kind of art in North Korea and putting it up in Namibia is that in a democratic society, people can decide what the art means to them. They can interact with it in ways that challenge its meaning. It's almost impossible to imagine ordinary North Koreans being free to stage protests at the site of a towering Kim Jong-il statue. But the equivalent is happening in Namibia. The Independence Museum might be steering people towards one version of the past, but conversations are also swirling around it, adding new layers to that meaning all the time.
SPEAKER_04: — If you say, we've got liberties and freedom, well, then show it to us. I don't think they thought that space would be used like that.
SPEAKER_06: — I've lived in southern Africa for almost a decade now, and I'm still struck by how history here often feels like wet clay, something that's still soft and can still be reshaped. There are no Kim Il-sungs in a country like Namibia. No one is untouchable in that way. At best, there are Samneomas, brave people with messy, imperfect legacies that are still being debated. You can still build statues to that kind of person, of course, but they're always going to feel like they could be toppled.
SPEAKER_15: — Coming up after the break, we hear more from former propaganda artist Byuk Song and his remarkable journey out of North Korea. — USA for UNHCR, the United Nations Refugee Agency, responds to emergencies and provides long-term solutions for refugees in places like Ukraine, Syria, Afghanistan, Sudan, and many more. UNHCR supports people forced to flee from war, violence, and persecution at their greatest moment of need. Every day, displaced families struggle to meet basic needs, like providing meals and clean water for their children. For many, the last few years have been the hardest. The global repercussions of war in Ukraine, leading to steep rises in the cost of basic commodities like food and fuel, combined with the climate crisis and COVID-19, formed a triple threat. Because of the commitment of their compassionate donors, UNHCR sends relief supplies and deploys its highly trained staff anywhere in the world at any given time. UNHCR is able to deploy within 72 hours of a large-scale emergency and jumpstart relief and protection assistance. Help deliver urgent aid. Your support can provide life-saving care and hope for a better future. Donate to USA for UNHCR by visiting unrefugees.org slash donation. The International Rescue Committee works in more than 40 countries to serve people whose lives have been upended by conflict and disaster. Over 110 million people are displaced around the world, and the IRC urgently needs your help to meet this unprecedented need. The IRC aims to respond within 72 hours after an emergency strikes, and they stay as long as they are needed. Some of the IRC's most important work is addressing the inequalities facing women and girls, ensuring safety from harm, improving health outcomes, increasing access to education, improving economic well-being, and ensuring women and girls have the power to influence decisions that affect their lives. Generous people around the world give to the IRC to help families affected by humanitarian crises with emergency supplies. Your generous donation will give the IRC steady, reliable support, allowing them to continue their ongoing humanitarian efforts even as they respond to emergencies. Donate today by visiting rescue.org slash rebuild. Donate now and help refugee families in need.
SPEAKER_15: This show is sponsored by BetterHelp. Do you ever find that just as you're trying to fall asleep, your brain suddenly won't stop talking? Your thoughts are just racing around? I call this just going to bed. It basically happens every night. It turns out one great way to make those racing thoughts go away is to talk them through. Therapy gives you a place to do that so you can get out of your negative thought cycles and find some mental and emotional peace. If you're thinking of starting therapy, give BetterHelp a try. It's entirely online, designed to be convenient, flexible, and suited to your schedule. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist and switch therapists at any time for no additional charge. Get a break from your thoughts with BetterHelp. Visit betterhelp.com slash invisible today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp. H-E-L-P dot com slash invisible. Squarespace is the all in one platform for building your brand and growing your business online. Stand out with a beautiful website, engage with your audience and sell anything. Your products, content you create and even your time. With member areas, you can unlock a new revenue stream for your business and free up time in your schedule by selling access to gated content. Like videos, online courses or newsletters. This summer, why not share your adventures with your followers in a newsletter or maybe make some fun video compilations of all your summer escapades. Now you can create pro level videos effortlessly in the Squarespace Video Studio app. You can easily display posts from your social profiles on your website or share your new blogs or videos on social media. Automatically push website content to your favorite channels so your followers can share it too. Plus, use Squarespace's insights to grow your business. Learn where your site visits and sales are coming from and analyze which channels are most effective. Go to Squarespace dot com slash invisible for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use the offer code invisible to save 10 percent off your first purchase of a website or domain. We're back with Ryan Lenora Brown, who reported this week's story, and Ryan, we're going to be talking more about the artist, Baeok Sung, who we heard from in the main story, and he's the North Korean artist. Yeah, that's right. And Baeok Sung has an amazing story of his own that we wanted listeners to hear about because while he worked for years as a propaganda artist in North Korea, he actually eventually escaped the country.
SPEAKER_06: Okay, so tell us how that happened.
SPEAKER_06: So for a number of years, he was working as a propaganda painter and actually not for Mansu Day. He worked for his local government, basically making posters to hang up around the city where he lived, glorified the Kim family, encouraged people to be loyal workers. But he knew of Mansu Day because it was basically the highest pinnacle that a propaganda worker like himself might ascend to.
SPEAKER_02: Even though I could imagine a future working in Mansu Day, it was but a dream.
SPEAKER_11: I couldn't even imagine, I didn't dare to imagine that I would end up there. In order to work there, you will have to graduate from an elite art college in the capital Pyongyang and then have to be a member of the party. Thousands of artists from a comprehensive pool of talents like statue, oil painting, and handcraft work there. And for me, from my background, it was hard to imagine that I can someday go there.
SPEAKER_15: So Mansu Day is kind of like the Harvard of propaganda artwork. Yeah, that's right. And the artists there are really revered in North Korea.
SPEAKER_06: But even outside Mansu Day, being an artist in North Korea is pretty good work. It spared Byuk from having to do hard labor, for instance. And he was producing these works that people he knew were going to see out in public. So there was a lot of pride attached to it too. But then everything started to change in the 90s when famine began to spread across North Korea.
SPEAKER_11: Although pride is important, what matters the most is your family. Only when families prosper, the country can prosper. But during the 1990s, the ration system of North Korea completely collapsed. And people could no longer get food from the government. And people had to watch their family members die from starvation. And what kind of hope could you have in the situation for the country of North Korea? So Byuk Song's family simply just didn't have enough to eat.
SPEAKER_06: My family was on the brink of death as well.
SPEAKER_11: So my father and I crossed over to China to let my family survive. But as we were crossing the river, my father got swept away. And I got arrested by the border guards while trying to save him. The oppression by the border guards that I had to endure cannot be described in words. And all that I had left after my time at the facility was hate for the Kim family. And I regretted the life that I had lived.
SPEAKER_15: That is just unbelievably tragic. It's so sad to hear.
SPEAKER_06: Yeah, so eventually Byuk Song was released and he crossed the border into China again. And this time he made it. But many, many other people did not. It's hard to know exactly how many people died. But it's estimated that between 1994 and 1998, 500,000 North Koreans died from starvation. Including a lot of Song's family. Some experts actually think the number is much higher. As high as 2 or 3 million.
SPEAKER_15: Wow. So Byuk Song made it into China. What happened then?
SPEAKER_06: He settled in South Korea first. And later he moved to Germany, which is where he lives now. And he watched Mansure become this big player in places like Namibia. Building these works that were commemorating independence and liberation. He said it was really painful to see.
SPEAKER_11: I used to see their works in the news. And I have even met a worker from Mansude studio. Who was dispatched overseas but arrived eventually in South Korea. Because North Korea is a dictatorship, when people are dispatched overseas to create statues or paintings. All the money that they earn as salary is taken by the North Korean government. And it makes me sad to see them. Why should they live the life of a slave even outside of North Korea? The statues that they built, they are worth tens of thousands of dollars apiece. But these workers don't even know how much North Korea is getting for their work. What they only get is some food items like rice and cooking oil. Sent by the government to their family members in North Korea. But the fascinating thing is that Byuk Song's own art has taken this really interesting turn.
SPEAKER_06: So I want to show you one of his more recent paintings. So this is a painting of a North Korean flag.
SPEAKER_15: As if it was painted on a wall. There's like a crack in the wall and all these men are shoving their heads into it. Maybe pushing each other into it. Kind of maybe burying their heads in it in a weird way. It's really striking and quite cool actually.
SPEAKER_06: Yeah so what Byuk Song has done is to take the stylized work of socialist realism. Which is the style he worked in as a propaganda artist for the state. And use it to satirize the North Korean regime. But it actually took him a while after he left North Korea to get to that place as an artist. It was embarrassing at first.
SPEAKER_11: I only tried to paint what's beautiful in a beautiful way. But my professor told me to find something that only I have. To look for that and dig deeper into it and study it. And I thought hard and concluded that my mission, the purpose of my painting. Should be to reveal the reality of North Korea as it is. Nothing added, nothing subtracted. So that settled in my mind as my mission.
SPEAKER_15: I love this trying to add a new realism to his socialist realism. Yeah no I agree.
SPEAKER_06: And I think for me what's really interesting about these images is that they're quite funny right? They draw attention to the fact that North Korea is this weird isolated little country. That can be really easy to laugh at. But you know also below the surface under that comedy are these really kind of painful tragic undertones. You can feel in this art that the stakes of North Korea's regime, you know it's paranoid repressive behavior. It's actually people's lives. Yeah yeah.
SPEAKER_15: Well I'm really happy to get deeper insight into Byok Sung after North Korea. Because this is really amazing work. And he seems like even more like an amazing character than he was. Like in the original story that you presented. It's outstanding. Thank you so much. Yeah thank you so much for having me.
SPEAKER_15: Special thanks this week to Se Eungong, Darshan Mudli, Kambanda Vae, Ellison Chirera, Hildegard Titus, Nasi Longwei Shipwe, and Yako Vassarfall. We are part of the Stitcher and SiriusXM podcast family. Now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building in beautiful uptown Oakland, California. You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet at me at Roman Mars and a show at 99pi.org. We're on Instagram and Reddit too. You can find links to other Stitcher shows I love as well as every past episode of 99pi at 99pi.org.
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