CHOE SANG-HUN/THE INTERNATIONAL HERALD TRIBUNE

SUN MU


By CHOE SANG-HUN

SEOUL, South Korea - In one of Sun Mu’s best-known paintings from his “Happy Children” series, uniformed North Korean kindergartners sing , their beaming faces so alike they could be clones. At the bottom of the posterlike image, a red slogan leaps out against a yellow background: “We are all happy children!”

When Sun Mu, an artist from North Korea who uses a pseudonym for security reasons, first exhibited paintings like this in Seoul two years ago, the police showed up to investigate. They had been tipped off by viewers who, missing the intended irony, were upset by what they took to be Communist propaganda - a possible crime under South Korea’s national security laws. After all, rapturously smiling child performers are a familiar feature of North Korean pageants, and the style mimics posters celebrating the North’s authoritarian regime.

“I’m not pro-Communist, far from it,”said Sun Mu, 36, who fled North Korea in 1998 to escape famine and arrived in South Korea in 2001.“When people look at my paintings, I hope they can hear the children asking,‘Do you really think we’re happy?’”

Sun Mu, who was trained to create posters and murals for the Communist government, is the first defector from the North to have won fame as a painter in the South by applying that same propagandistic style to biting parodies of the North Korean regime.

His renown, however, is shaded by political concerns. In addition to adopting a pseudonym, he refuses to allow his face to be photographed, afraid that the family he left behind might face reprisals for his art. South Korean news outlets often refer to him as the“faceless”or“nameless”artist from North Korea.

“His work touches the national trauma of the divided Korea,”said Kim Dong-il, a visual arts critic and lecturer at Sogang University in Seoul.“His style is North Korean, but when he brought it to South Korea it became something completely different. The children’s smiles in his paintings become too idealized to be real.”

Sun Mu’s paintings have also depicted his own fearful journey across the river border into China in 1998, and the plight of a shackled North Korean defector who was repatriated to North Korea from the same Laotian prison where he himself was detained before proceeding on to Thailand and eventually to South Korea.

So far, however, his signature work has been the“Happy Children”series, with its relentlessly smiling North Korean youngsters. Sun Mu said he used to wear that smile himself. In North Korea, he and his classmates smilingly sang hymns to Kim Jong-il, the North Korean leader, and would perform for soldiers and farmers toiling in the fields.

“They teach you how to smile that regimented smile - there’s a certain way to shape your mouth,”he said.“We children thought we were happy. We didn’t realize that our smile was fabricated and manufactured.”

Sun Mu also paints portraits of Mr.Kim and his father, North Korea’s founder, Kim Il-sung. In one, Kim Jong-il is dressed not in his trademark Mao-style suit but in a pink Nike sports jacket, red Adidas pants and mismatched running shoes. Mr.Kim is transformed from supreme leader to bourgeois loafer.

Nonetheless, displaying the Kims’ images has proved controversial. At an exhibition in 2007, South Korean viewers objected to a Sun Mu portrait of Kim Jong-il that carried the title“God of Korea.”

“I cannot help being political,”he said.“How can I ignore the reality of the North, where my parents are still suffering? I would like to believe that art can change the world in whatever little way it can.”