Re-viewing sovereignty, North Korean authoritarianism, and art

Abstract

Emerging research on North Korean art mainly reads North Korean art, art theory, and art institutions for the roles they play in sustaining a North Korean authoritarian political system. To counter this trend, I turn to North Korean art and art/political theory to critique the deployment of authoritarianism in international research on North Korea and more fundamentally, to interrogate prevailing conceptions of sovereignty that feed into contemporary international interventionist practices. I begin by both problematizing the hierarchy in international politics that the authoritarian framework reifies and illustrating how North Korean juche ideology can be read to complicate how sovereign relations work, feel, and look in North Korea and beyond. I turn my analytical focus to North Korean paintings that circulate globally, and in particular the case of the 2010 MAK exhibition in Vienna. Rather than conceiving of art and art spaces as new arenas for bringing change into North Korea, I argue that these emerging sites that bring new actors, institutions, and traditions in contact should be viewed as intercultural sites for shiftings in sovereign politics through North Korea. My argument is that reinterpretation of North Korean political ideology and ways of reading North Korean art have major implications for reimagining sovereign relations in a post-Cold War, postcolonial era.