As a liberal Western consumer, it's become a habit to moan about being
bombarded every day by posters for handcreams that don't really work
and new flavours of sugary drinks that taste ever so slightly different
from their predecessors. But is it so bad? For the citizens of North
Korea, the daily journey to work can often be punctuated with a similar
amount of visual persuasion. But rather than seeing a semi-naked Elle
Macpherson or that speccy goon from the Halifax commercial, much of
their ambient eye-candy is expressly aimed at exploring several
variations on the theme of America being crushed to a pulp at the hands
of North Korea's swarthy might.
The striking works of propaganda art that appear on Pyong-Yang
billboards operate in the same subliminal headspace as Western
advertising: just subsitute Kim Jong Il's Communist Dream for Honda's
Power of Dreams. But therein lies the key difference between the plight
of the outraged Islington liberal and the repressed worker/intellectual
in North Korea's capital: while we can choose a Skoda instead, the
people of North Korea have to lump it.
Stylistically, these posters poise somewhere between the classic
Russian and Chinese propaganda posters and Marvel comics. The tone is
fanatical, fantastical, pornographicaly violent. But one thing's for
sure: America gets it, hard, up the ass, each and every time.