By Craig Simons

Together, they essentially represent the two creative outlets for artists in North Korea today: Soviet-influenced, socialist-realist depictions of industrial workers, and traditional studies of nature.

In neighboring China, where many young artists have gravitated toward more globalized, contemporary styles, those genres have largely gone the way of socialism. But in North Korea, one of the world’s most isolated countries, it seems that they are still rigorously maintained. Until last year, these two paintings never left the Pyongyang Art Studio, a factory-scale complex of art workshops in North Korea’s capital. Then Nicholas Bonner, a 43-year-old Briton, negotiated the Pyongyang government’s approval for a gallery of the same name in central Beijing. It is the first one outside North Korea to deal exclusively with the country’s art, Bonner said, though some galleries in South Korea occasionally sell works from the North.

Bonner, who has traveled to North Korea since 1993, proposed working with the Pyongyang studio because, he said, its 40 artists included some of the country’s better, older painters. With a Chinese partner and the approval of the North Korean government, he has brought more than 1,000 works here. [...]

"The artists are stuck in a time warp and have not had access to modern Western art since before the 1950s," Jane Portal, a curator at the British Museum’s Oriental antiquities department and author of the forthcoming "Art Under Control in North Korea," said in an e-mail interview. In June, the museum will exhibit contemporary North Korean paintings, prints, calligraphy, and ceramics that she collected on recent trips.

When Han Chang Kyu, the director of the National Gallery in Pyongyang, visited London in 2001, Portal said, he was taken to see several Picasso works and commented only that he did "not understand abstract art."

Art training in North Korea starts early, Bonner said. Children showing artistic talent are selected for art programs when they are as young as 5. In addition to attending academic courses like "revolutionary history," they begin a rigorous process of learning to create socialist-realist images. The best students are eventually selected for schools like the University of Fine Arts in Pyongyang. There they are trained in traditional Korean ink-wash painting as well as in socialist-realist work in oil and ink. [...]

In North Korea, artists are still trained largely so that they can celebrate the state’s accomplishments and help guide the people according to the government’s wishes. Jong Il Bong’s 2003 ink wash "Our Mind" shows smiling children returning trout to a mountain stream. The work seems merely idyllic until Bonner points out that they are releasing the fish so they can breed on the mountain where, according to North Korean legend, the current leader, Kim Jong Il, was born.

Hundreds of other works at the Beijing gallery belong to the school of juchehwa, or thematic painting, which glorifies revolutionary subjects. "Hear the Rice Sway," a 1989 oil painting, shows soldiers marching triumphantly through rice fields. [...]

Prices for the paintings at the Pyongyang Art Studio in Beijing range from $80 to thousands of dollars each. Socialist-realist works sell best among the Chinese and most foreigners, Bonner said, but the ink washes are especially popular with South Koreans.

Bonner, who also runs tours to North Korea, brushed aside any criticism that his activities helped prop up an oppressive regime, even though a percentage of the art sales is funneled through government coffers. "The money we pay is feeding people who are directly involved in tourism and art," he said, adding that he generally steered clear of politics. "If we got involved we might not be able to do what we do."

If there is a silver lining to Kim’s viselike grip on North Korean culture, it is the preservation of the methods used to create traditional landscapes. Bonner pointed out his own favorite, Son’s "Inner Kumgang in Autumn," a large ink-wash painting of a waterfall, yellow leaves, and white clouds. "He’s taken the landscape down to its minimal colors and shapes," Bonner said. "It’s got a great fresh feeling."

He added: "The fine arts in the North haven’t changed. The works they produce are now probably the purest form of Oriental painting."

(The New York Times, May 19, 2005)