Che Onejoon’s documentary film Mansudae Master Class (2013-2015), currently on view at the New Museum Triennial: Surround Audience (Feb 25-May 24, 2015), is an unfinished version of a feature length film and part of Che’s ongoing project of the same title, Mansudae Master Class. Its title derives from Mansudae, a North Korean art studio focused on official propaganda founded during the time of Kim Il-sung; it has established branches in at least 16 African countries since 1969. The studio’s mission is diplomatic: through the design and construction of memorial monuments, statues and architecture to illustrate the local government’s power (while also promoting the ideology of North Korean socialism), the DPRK has hoped to build foreign support in the United Nations. In short, the project is a survey of the North Korean projection of soft power in Africa through architecture and sculpture—works nowhere to be seen in South Korea.
Che Onejoon. Mansudae Master Class. Film Stills of HD three channel video, 40min.
2013-2015 (Ongoing project). © 2015 the artist.
Mansudae Master Class consists of a series of video installations, and in some of its mutations, archival materials and political propaganda as well as miniature replicas of the propaganda sculptures. In the case of the New Museum project, Che’s new film is shown in the screening room; an earlier version of the one-channel video documentation with miniature sculptures and photographs is displayed in the exhibition space. The artist claims that he sees his subject as a means to understand North Korean culture; it’s “not art, but something that bridges us to North Korea.” Despite this explicit denial of the aesthetic pleasure of the material evidence of North Korean-African political relations, the new film presents the monuments not as quirky propaganda, but rather as examples of fine craftsmanship and clear visual language. The sculptures and wall reliefs sometimes present African politicians, sometimes the People —workers, farmers and soldiers raising their arms, or holding weapons, staring firmly into the distance. The figures have vague, mixed characteristics in their faces and figures, somewhere between typical East Asian and Sub-Saharan African.
Che interviewed Senegalese and Zimbabweans who were involved in those enterprises or diplomatic relations. However most people wanted to discuss politics instead of art, except for Doreen Sibanda, Director of National Gallery in Zimbawe. She notes of the sculpture compound situated in front of the Hero’s Acre in Harare that there was some controversy about the visual presence of foreigners, but beyond that, that “it’s very heroic,” and that the visual language of socialist realism is “in a sense very appropriate.” The ideology of North Korea is translated into the local powers’ ideology, as they have to collaborate with the local government. And in many cases these projects have become public spaces where people meet and linger, entering people’s daily lives, rather than or in addition to spreading North Korean propaganda. The African Renaissance Monument (2010), designed by the Senegalese architect Pierre Goudia on the basis of an idea of the president Abdoulaye Wade and built by Mansudae Overseas Projects, has been criticized for being “Stalinist” in its visual language.
Che Onejoon. Mansudae Master Class. Film Stills of HD 3 channel video, 40min.
2013-2015 (Ongoing project). © 2015 the artist.
So far Che has conducted three research trips to Africa to shoot films and conduct surveys and interviews. The first video from the Mansudae Master Class series was shown in 2013, and the artist added footage to the project each time he conducted new research. He sees each mutation as a unique work. Its different versions have been exhibited in the Korean Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2014 and Media City Seoul in 2014, among others.
After finishing vocational school, Che was conscripted into the military and assigned the duty of photographing illegal political protesters, who would then be imprisoned. This kind of documentary photography was the beginning of his lens-based work and his later video work would show a strong leaning towards photographic stills in its rhythm and composition. The Cold War and remnants of South Korea’s military past have been central to Che’s concern in his photography and video works before Mansudae, in which he photographed and filmed discarded bunkers built by South Korean government around Seoul, as well as underground tunnels used by North Koreans to send spies.
Che Onejoon. Mansudae Master Class. Film Stills of HD 3 channel video, 40min.
2013-2015 (Ongoing project). © 2015 the artist.
Che Onejoon. Archive Installation of Mansudae Master Class (Consists of Communism Books by South Korea, Communism books by North Korea and Rodong Sinmun (News Paper of Worker’s Party in North Korea), SeMA. Biennale Mediacity Seoul 2014. © 2015 the artist.
The project is the first on-the-ground research of its kind. The documentary about Mansudae has mapped out a less-known visual language through a neutral documentary voice. He is editing the installation film into a feature length film, and he plans to make it available for TV channels. The question remains of how this project can be seen as art: according to Che, this marks as an expansion of the genre of his work, rather than merely an instance of commercialization.
In the process of tracing the activities of the Mansudae studio, Che never met with a single Mansudae masters. “I tried,” he said.
