Life's a Stage: North Korea's Mass Games

Often when we refer to the craft skills and media used in design we talk about such things as typography, photography, pixels, PostScript and drawing. Rarely considered a medium of design are people. Except in North Korea that is.

This piece was originally going to be a review of a documentary called A State of Mind, a film that focuses on the dazzling (and slightly terrifying) socialist realist spectacle of the Mass Games of North Korea. The film screened on the last day of the Melbourne International Film Festival. However, it was a cold and rainy Sunday in Melbourne and festival-goers were eager to watch the last glowing embers of this year's festival. Which meant that the queue for the film was long and we missed out.

Experiencing the sheer graphic, retinal impact of the Mass Games was going to have to wait.

As my partner is (South) Korean I have access to much of Korean culture, now have a Korean family and have travelled there a few times. I'm partial to Korean cinema, design and very partial to Korean food. OK – I'm extremely partial to Korean food.

The North Korean/South Korean relationship has always fascinated me. Going on country drives through northern South Korea, one often spies camouflaged military hardware hiding in the forests. Their northern beaches, in the off-season, are circled by razor wire and feature machine gun posts dotted along the coast. You occasionally bump into a platoon of American soldiers, and all South Korean males must do two years military service. If you're North Korean, you're up for ten years of military service.

On one hand the relationship is quite severe and reinforced by militia. On the other, the South Koreans (at least the ones I know) refer to the North as still being very much 'Korean' and very much part of an extended, but somewhat distant family. In fact, many South Korean families have a photographic print of Cheonji Lake from the North hanging in their lounge room. This beautiful lake set in in a volcanic crater features prominently in the collective memory and iconography of South Koreans, but most have never been there, nor will they ever get the opportunity to visit.

'A State of Mind' was hopefully going to explain a bit more about the psyche and motivations of North Koreans. Were they really that dutifully obedient to the imposed Juche Idea order of Kim Jong Il? Can they keep supporting such a maverick totalitarian regime even though they're suffering, starving (thanks to a long-running famine) and very much in dire straits?

Well, I missed the film and for me, some of those questions will have to wait to be answered. This web site features photography of the Mass Games*. Startling in their use of design, breathtaking in their scale but somewhat menacing in their overt-regulation and single, controlling focus. Makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up anyway.

The Mass Games are regarded as being the largest and "most elaborate human performance on earth"**. 40,000 youngsters hold up brightly coloured cards that create huge panoramic images of the heroic Leader, heroic soldiers, heroic schoolchildren and heroic farm produce. Its a very powerful, regimented image of control – all is done in perfect synchronicity with 100,000 gymnasts, dancers and flag wavers progressing through tightly choreographed moves with dazzling precision. It's like watching human pixels create images before your eyes***.

Unlike China and Vietnam who have remained Communist but moved on to a newer, modern form of 'Market Communism' and are reaping the benefits of joining the twenty-first century, North Korea clings very much to old-style Communism. Unfortunately for the inhabitants of this floundering country, this means that they may just be 'marching pixels' used to conjur up some bizarre bigger picture that's completely out of step with the rest of the world.

Notes

Above left: Image of North Korea's Cheonji Lake atop Mt. Baekdusan from Tour 2 Korea. Similar photographs adorn the lounge room walls of many South Koreans. Right: Nightsky image of the Korean peninsula from World 66. This image speaks for itself: South Korea and Seoul (centre of photo) are aglow with lights and technological progress while the North slumbers in self-imposed darkness (and power shortages).

* Visit here to start exploring the site that documents someone's trip to North Korea.

** The BBC's interview with the documentary-makers.

*** These figures are from this aforementioned tourist site.

Domus magazine is running a competition to develop ideas for the hypothetical development of the extraordinary Ryugyong Hotel in Pyongyang. From Wikipedia: "Its 105 stories rise some 330 m (1,083 ft), and it boasts some 360,000 m² (3.9 million ft²) of floor space, making it the most prominent feature of the city's skyline and by far the largest structure in that country. If the building were ever completed it would be one of the world's largest hotels, and one of the world's largest buildings overall. Today, however, it remains unfinished and uninhabited." And – there are no windows. And – the hotel was to have no less than seven revolving restaurants (to be seen in the image below, at the top of the unfinished structure).

The Ryugyong Hotel. Image from the Wikipedia entry on this structure.

Comments

[ajit yadav]

It's structure is very beautiful. I like it.