Subversive exposure: Realism and masquerade in Song Byeok's art practice

At age 24, Song Byeok became an official state propaganda artist under the totalitarian Kim regime of North Korea. After famine, family death, torture and prison camp, Song escaped from North Korea in 2002 and continued to create art in South Korea. Song Byeok now embraces his artistic freedom by subverting the ideals and indoctrinations of his former upbringing. Creating parodical imagery, he pairs North Korean Juche Realism with elements of Pop, mocking the ideology and former figurehead Kim Jong Il. His satirical painting Take off Your Clothes (2010) juxtaposes the head of Kim Jong Il with the body of pop icon, Marilyn Monroe subverting the ideal image of the dictator by feminizing it.;Song Byeok's hybridization of Kim Jong Il's image recalls similar parodic representations of Chairman Mao and Monroe created by the Chinese Political Pop artists of the late 1980s. These artists confronted Mao's Socialist Realism by utilizing it in combination with Western Pop iconography, subverting its ideal. Song Byeok's work is comparable as it transforms the visual language used by the Kim regime to weaken it. These artists employed the device of the feminine masquerade to ridicule their leaders, exposing the dualistic nature of their subject by challenging the past ideal to divulge a new message. Similarly, Song Byeok creates his Kim/Monroe figure to offer the viewer an alternative, formulating an invented pop icon that alters the perception of their controlled political system.;Song Byeok moreover relies on the tools of the North Korean spectacle to expose the artificiality of its propagandistic imagery and his work can be analyzed along side Guy Debord's theses Society of the Spectacle (1967). Debord's commentary of the spectacularized system endures as a critical analysis of the North Korean state and correlates with the subversive artwork Song Byeok produces. By using the language of the North Korean spectacle, Song Byeok also contradicts it, going beyond its limits to shed light on its false representations. Inventing a subversive contemporary pop icon within an alternative reality, Song Byeok challenges the spectacuarlized masquerade in North Korea and offers a unique example of the importance of artistic freedom.