Text/Bao Guitao (Curator/Art Critic)
Today's North Korean art unexpectedly becomes a fuse of nostalgia, leading you back to the pre-industrial context. For example, self-growing villages, free-flowing rivers, ubiquitous rural dirt roads, native landforms and vegetation. In short, you can't find the word "planning" in the North Korean landscape oil painting. This kind of "inability to find" is not the background of industrialized civilization, artists go to the nature to dig out the search of the mind, and then, according to the nostalgia in their hearts, go back to the past. This kind of creation requires the artist to switch between two completely different contexts. Recover all kinds of losses in the reconstruction of utopia. As a natural landscape in the artist's place, it is restored into an artistic landscape. You're bound to drive hikes, eat fast food on hard-earned picturesque landscapes, and the irreversible passage of time often frustrates artists. This makes some other places as landscapes a "base" for landscapes, making artists linger.
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For North Korean artists, stepping out of Pyongyang or out of a few central cities would be filled with agrarian civilization. Artists don't have to reinvent local nature based on "old experiences." And artists will not lose their local landscapes because of limited urbanization. In other words, in addition to all kinds of famous mountains and rivers with symbolic meanings, they only need to directly express the daily life, and only need to express their eyesight. Today's artists, along with politicians, fully identify with the "commanding heights" constructed by the achievements and development goals of construction, and although art seeks nostalgia, quality of life is needed. Therefore, the connotations that many people read from The Painting of The North Korean Landscape are also presented as almost opposing views. As a result, nostalgia sometimes has a moral high ground and sometimes appears negative. But the passing and the demise are irreversible, and therefore the scenery from the "past tense" always awakens the smoke of the deep inside.
Today, nostalgia is planned either as an industry or as a scene construction needed for nostalgia, on the other hand, it is vigilant that nostalgia should not become a negative tone, which spoils the excitement of soaring. But all this proves the necessity of nostalgia. If the various "passing" is irreversible to human beings, then nostalgia becomes a path of exorcism and self-examination. In fact, the context of nostalgia is completely different, including cultural, economic, social, folklore and so on. Economic development, in particular, as a nostalgic context, actually has the premise of "stratification". For example, a certain piece of the sea can only be felt by the private yacht as a carrier. For example, climbing "Everest" or other hook-ups requires a huge guarantee investment.
Korean art in the context of globalization, because of its characteristics of the stage of development, seems to have a natural (natural) "old" meaning. This so-called "old meaning" is expressed in the field of artistic creation, which is a kind of sluggish or lagging reality, a kind of synchronization on the timeline, but it is presented as a huge difference in the conceptual axis. The reason for this situation is one thing, and the work comes to the scene of globalization in the form of artistic creation, and with its particularity, it also embodies its own value and deeds when it comes to this scene. As a result, in view of the internationalization of Korean art, there has been a unique phenomenon, that is, the continuous "presence" of works, while artists are almost "absent". At the same time, the global scene also understands the difference that this polity brings. Moreover, to regard it as different from the "old" that has disappeared is a kind of surviving "old", which can be remembered and observed, and is only a variation of "nostalgia".
After the mid-1990s, Chinese contemporary art gradually revealed its "Chinese identity" in the scene of globalization, and artists began to wander in the scene of globalization and were comfortable. The export of North Korean art also began its own process. For well-known reasons, North Korean art has also tried to find a process of settling down in Europe, Southeast Asia, and Africa, but in the end, it turns out that China is the largest, best, and most tolerant away field for the internationalization of North Korean art. This fact was consolidated in the first decade of the new century and formed a market demand in the true sense of the word. The second decade of the 21st century laid a solid foundation for the significance and value of the internationalization of Korean art. Among them, the most critical indicators are some artists and works that represent the international weight of Korean art. Gradually recognized.
Now it seems that the achievements of North Korean art export in the Chinese art market are many and complex, but there are two key points, one is the cultural foundation of the Greater China Cultural Circle, so that the Chinese art market is not unfamiliar with North Korean art, and even has a natural affinity. At some point, watching North Korean art seems to open up a dusty memory, not a distant past back in front of you. The second is nostalgia, North Korean art in the scene of China's rapid development, not showing out of place, on the contrary, North Korean art has become a nostalgic fuse of the accelerated development of China's scene. This kind of nostalgia is not the nostalgia of nostalgia, but prompts, questions, so that the fearless indomitable, some quiet. Stop the vigilance. Among them, one of the most interesting phenomena is that the provinces and cities with good artistic recognition in North Korea are precisely the power source and locomotive of China's reform and opening up. That is to say, the more export-oriented open the region, the better the development of the North Korean art market, and the age group and knowledge span of collectors are also particularly large.
Twenty years after the new century, whether it is development or future, from the perspective of the political system, the possibility of large variables is getting smaller and smaller, and everyone seems to be operating in a category that is uncertain but predictable. If there is a variable, the Korean Peninsula is certainly the largest in Northeast Asia and the world. This variable, at least for the moment, doesn't have much room for prediction. This is where curiosity and focus arise, which is the reality of North Korean art that has come to the scene of globalization. That is to say, Korean art gives us not only accidental nostalgia, but also an open space and possible dimension.
Source of content (Imagasai Museum of Art)