Arts and Culture

Category: Culture & Society
Key figures: Shin Sang-ok, Choi Eun-hee, Kim Yo-jong, Kim Jong-il, Pak Hak, Moranbong Band

Summary

North Korean arts and culture are entirely state-controlled instruments of propaganda and regime legitimacy. The DPRK operates a centralized cultural apparatus where all film, music, literature, visual arts, and performance are produced within state institutions and must reflect juche ideology, the personality cult of the Kim family, and official political doctrine. The regime strictly controls all media production through censorship, the Propaganda and Agitation Department (now under Kim Yo-jong’s leadership), and mandatory ideological review boards. International cultural imports are forbidden to civilians; entertainment must emphasize revolutionary history, military might, and the superiority of the socialist system.

Historical Development of State Culture

Cultural policy in the DPRK traces to the immediate post-liberation period of 1945–1948. Kim Il-sung adopted the Soviet Zhdanov doctrine, which held that culture must serve the working class and the party. The Soviet-aligned model required artists to register with state unions and submit work for ideological approval. By 1950 the Korean Writers’ Alliance, the Korean Artists’ Federation, and the Korean Composers’ Union had been absorbed into centralized party organizations. After the Korean War (1950–1953), the regime launched a massive cultural reconstruction campaign to replace urban spaces, memorials, and cultural institutions destroyed in the fighting.

Kim Jong-il, who served as head of the Propaganda and Agitation Department from 1967 onward before becoming Supreme Leader, was personally obsessed with film and cultural production. He authored a treatise, On the Art of the Cinema (1973), which became mandatory reading in North Korean film schools and laid out his theory of art as a revolutionary tool. He personally supervised film productions, reviewed screenplays, and approved or rejected cultural projects at every stage. His influence shaped North Korean cultural policy for nearly four decades and created the centralized studio system that still operates.

Film

Film production in the DPRK dates to the establishment of the Korean Film Studio (later reorganized as the Korean Feature Film Studio) in Pyongyang in 1947. The studio system expanded significantly after the Korean War, constructing purpose-built facilities on the outskirts of Pyongyang by the 1960s. By 1970, the DPRK was producing an estimated 40–50 films annually, almost all in the propaganda genre—war films glorifying the Korean War, revolutionary biopics centered on Kim Il-sung’s Manchurian guerrilla struggle, class-war dramas, and anti-American thrillers.

The most dramatic episode in North Korean film history was the kidnapping of South Korean director Shin Sang-ok and his actress wife Choi Eun-hee. Kim Jong-il, dissatisfied with the quality of DPRK film production, ordered the abduction of Shin, who had been one of South Korea’s most prominent directors in the 1950s and 1960s. Choi Eun-hee was abducted in Hong Kong in January 1978; Shin Sang-ok, who had traveled to Hong Kong in search of her, was abducted there in July 1978. He attempted to escape, was recaptured, and spent several years in prison and reeducation before being reunited with Choi in 1983. The couple was then forced to work under Kim Jong-il’s personal supervision, producing roughly seven films between 1983 and 1986, including Pulgasari (1985), a monster film in the Godzilla tradition that serves as an allegory about revolutionary class struggle. Shin and Choi escaped to the American embassy in Vienna in March 1986 during a film festival trip and subsequently told their story publicly.

Under Kim Jong-un, film production has diversified slightly. Animated films—produced by the SEK Studio (Scientific Educational Korean), established in 1957—have expanded in output and occasionally been contracted by foreign entities, though this practice declined after international sanctions tightened. The regime has also produced dramatic series rather than just feature films, airing them on Korean Central Television (KCTV).

Music and Performance

Music is among the most tightly controlled arts in the DPRK. Composers must work within state-approved forms and must set works to party-approved texts. The revolutionary opera, a hybrid form that Kim Jong-il championed in the 1970s, combines operatic staging with Korean folk music, revolutionary lyrics, and large-scale spectacle. The five canonical “revolutionary operas”—including Sea of Blood (1971), The Flower Girl (1972), and A True Daughter of the Party—were developed under Kim Jong-il’s direction and remain repertoire standards performed at the Pyongyang Grand Theatre.

The Mansudae Art Troupe, founded in 1959 and attached to the military, produces operatic and dramatic performances with mass mobilization, combining music, dance, and visual spectacle to celebrate the regime. Its productions, staged at venues including the Mangyongdae Palace of Culture and the Grand Theatre, typically involve casts of hundreds and elaborate stagecraft.

The Unhasu Orchestra, an elite state ensemble established around 2009, provided orchestral and chamber music for diplomatic occasions and high-profile performances before it faded from public view in the mid-2010s. Kim Jong-un formed the Moranbong Band in July 2012, personally selecting members from among the country’s top performers. The band adopted elements of pop and electronic music—synthesizers, short skirts, Disney characters on stage backdrops—in a highly deliberate modernization of the state’s cultural image. The Moranbong Band’s concerts were broadcast on KCTV and served both a domestic mobilization function and an external signal that Kim Jong-un intended to project a less rigid image than his father. However, the band’s lyrics remained entirely ideological, praising Kim Jong-un, the military, and the socialist system.

Mass games—choreographed displays involving tens of thousands of participants performing in unison to create human mosaics, dances, and acrobatics—represent North Korea’s most spectacular cultural export. The Arirang Mass Games, first performed in 2002 and staged irregularly since, hold the Guinness World Record for the largest performance involving human participants. The 2007 Arirang games were estimated to involve 100,000 performers at the May Day Stadium, the world’s largest sporting venue by capacity (114,000 seats).

Literature

Literature in North Korea is almost entirely propaganda. Novels glorify Kim family members and revolutionary struggle; short stories reinforce class consciousness and the songbun (hereditary loyalty classification) system; and poetry praises military heroism and economic production targets. The approved canon centers on a handful of works attributed to Kim Il-sung himself, including a multi-volume memoir, With the Century, ghostwritten by party historians. Works attributed to Kim Jong-il, particularly On the Art of the Cinema and The Theory of Music, are treated as authoritative aesthetic treatises.

The regime permits a limited range of foreign literature in translation, heavily censored and annotated. Russian classics—Gorky, Tolstoy, Chekhov—were circulated in approved translations during the Soviet-aligned period. After the USSR’s collapse, translations of non-Soviet foreign literature became even rarer. Access to foreign publications is otherwise entirely prohibited, and possession of outside books or broadcasts is punishable by severe sanctions including imprisonment in political prison camps (kwanliso).

Visual Arts and Sculpture

Visual arts—painting and sculpture—are dominated by the Mansudae Art Studio, established in 1959 in Pyongyang. The studio employs thousands of professional artists who specialize in producing monumental propaganda sculptures, murals depicting Kim family members in heroic poses, and official portraiture. The studio’s most prominent works include the Grand Monument on Mansu Hill—two bronze statues of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il, each approximately 22 meters tall, unveiled in their current paired form in 2012—and numerous smaller monuments across the country.

The Mansudae Overseas Projects division exports North Korean artistic labor internationally, building statues, monuments, and government buildings for friendly regimes across Africa, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East. Between the 1970s and the 2010s, Mansudae teams constructed monuments in Zimbabwe, Namibia, Mozambique, Senegal, Benin, Ethiopia, Botswana, and other countries, often working for regimes or leaders who lacked the funds or skills to commission local artists. This activity generated significant hard currency for the DPRK state and continued into the 2010s despite international pressure, until UN sanctions from 2017 onward restricted overseas labor contracting.

Painting follows the “Korean painting” (Joseon-hwa) tradition—ink and color on Korean paper—but subject matter is entirely determined by ideological requirements: landscapes emphasizing the beauty of the Korean mountains and rivers as homeland, portraits of Kim family members, scenes of heroic industrial or agricultural labor, and military subjects. “Socialist realism” in the Soviet sense has been largely replaced by a distinctly North Korean aesthetic that combines traditional Korean artistic forms with ideological content.

Cultural Control Mechanisms

The Propaganda and Agitation Department (PAD) of the Workers’ Party of Korea oversees all cultural production. Historically headed by senior party officials close to the Supreme Leader, the PAD under Kim Jong-un has been managed by his sister Kim Yo-jong, who assumed an increasing role from approximately 2014 onward. The department reviews all cultural works before distribution, approves all artistic personnel, and sets thematic priorities for each cultural season.

All performers, writers, artists, and composers must belong to the appropriate state union (the Korean Writers’ Union, Korean Artists’ Union, Korean Musicians’ Union). Union membership is contingent on political loyalty and songbun classification. Artists from politically unreliable families cannot pursue cultural careers. Senior cultural figures, including lead singers and prominent actors, are given privileges—better housing, food rations, access to luxury goods—as incentives for loyal production and performance. The regime periodically conducts purges of cultural figures who fall out of political favor; dismissal typically means loss of union membership, demotion to manual labor, or in serious cases imprisonment.

Since the 1990s, the regime has faced a rising challenge from the penetration of foreign media through DVD and USB distribution networks, primarily smuggling South Korean dramas, films, and pop music (K-pop). The regime has responded with increasingly harsh enforcement—public executions for traders of foreign media were reported from the 2000s onward—and with a 2020 anti-reactionary thought law that increased penalties for consuming or distributing foreign content to potential death sentences. Despite this, demand for outside cultural content continues among North Korean populations willing to pay for access.

Significance

Arts and culture in North Korea are among the most visible expressions of totalitarian control over daily life and consciousness. Unlike the security apparatus or labor camps, cultural institutions are broadcast internationally as proof of North Korea’s “advanced civilization” and are deployed to mobilize domestic support for regime policies and the ruling ideology. The hijacking of film and the creation of state art studios demonstrate the regime’s obsession with narrative control and its willingness to kidnap foreign artists to serve propaganda aims.

The evolution of cultural policy under Kim Jong-un—particularly the modernization attempts represented by groups like the Moranbong Band and expanded animated film production—reflects the regime’s anxiety about generational change and the appeal of outside cultural influences while maintaining ideological discipline. The state’s near-total monopoly on cultural production means that North Koreans have no access to uncensored art, music, or literature through legal channels, making culture a tool for shaping perception and preventing any alternative worldview from gaining ground. The growing underground market for South Korean cultural content represents one of the most significant ongoing challenges to this monopoly.

Related

• State Ideology and Propaganda — the broader propaganda state, the songbun class system, and the juche ideology that subsumes cultural production
• Kim Yo-jong — the senior figure overseeing the Propaganda and Agitation Department and cultural policy
• Kim Jong-il — his cinema obsession and the abduction of Shin Sang-ok and Choi Eun-hee
• Economic System and Famine — the Mansudae art enterprises and overseas projects as revenue-generating cultural exports
• Partition and Founding (1945–1948) — the Soviet-aligned origins of North Korean cultural policy
• Korean War — the cultural reconstruction campaign following wartime destruction