North Korea’s Exports of Monumental Arts: On the Angkor Panorama Museum in Cambodia

Abstract

Since the 1980s the Mansudae Overseas Project Group of Companies (MOP) of North Korea has sold abroad, primarily to African countries, architectural structures and artworks continually. And yet the inclusion of sanctions against MOP in the United Nations Security Council Resolution 2371 (August 2017) imposed a de facto blockage in trade channels through which North Korea had exported artworks in large scale. Under this political climate the Angkor Panorama Museum, which opened in Siem Reap, Cambodia in 2015, draws attention as the latest case of the art exports from the isolated regime. The Museum features a 360-degree spherical panoramic painting of monumental scale and other artworks—sculptural, pictorial, and video—that North Korean artists created collectively to represent Cambodian history and culture of the tenth to thirteenth centuries. Besides, the institution puts on sale acrylics, oil paintings, prints, gem paintings, and embroideries, which North Korean artisans have produced after taking motifs from Cambodian essential cultural sites or local scenery. Although it is less known how the Angkor Panorama Museum has reached its actual establishment, the close personal relationship between former leaders, Kim Il-sung (1912-1994) and King Norodom Sihanouk (1922-2012), is believed to have laid the foundation. For the construction of the Museum, quite unusually, North Korea funded more than 24 billion won and further agreed to engage in its long-term operation and management. What is also notable is a choice of Angkor-Age of Prosperity, the cyclorama painting a group of 63 North Korean artists executed in collectivity, for the face of its exports to the Museum: this is an aberration because it used to be bronze figural sculptures or monuments that North Korea has continued to produce for and sell to African nations. The Angkor-Age of Prosperity embodies an aesthetic principle of an original composition peculiar to North Korea, featuring “monumentality” that Kim Jong-il(1941-2011)'s 1992 publication “Treaties on Art” (Misullon) emphasizes. This study looks into how the North Korean aesthetic principle came into play in this Cambodian case, how it served Cambodian indigenous qualities at the same time, and what characteristics and art-historical significance it holds.