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.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
DITCH TACTICS: Kenyan officers were on their way to rescue Haitian police stuck in a ditch suspected to have been deliberately dug by Haitian gang members A Kenyan policeman deployed in Haiti has gone missing after violent gangs attacked a group of officers on a rescue mission, a UN-backed multinational security mission said in a statement yesterday. The Kenyan officers on Tuesday were on their way to rescue Haitian police stuck in a ditch “suspected to have been deliberately dug by gangs,” the statement said, adding that “specialized teams have been deployed” to search for the missing officer. Local media outlets in Haiti reported that the officer had been killed and videos of a lifeless man clothed in Kenyan uniform were shared on social media. Gang violence has left
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
Japan unveiled a plan on Thursday to evacuate around 120,000 residents and tourists from its southern islets near Taiwan within six days in the event of an “emergency”. The plan was put together as “the security situation surrounding our nation grows severe” and with an “emergency” in mind, the government’s crisis management office said. Exactly what that emergency might be was left unspecified in the plan but it envisages the evacuation of around 120,000 people in five Japanese islets close to Taiwan. China claims Taiwan as part of its territory and has stepped up military pressure in recent years, including