By Kim Se-jeong
Song Byeok wasn’t a professional artist before arriving in Seoul yet his job was to produce propaganda posters and literature for the North Korean Workers’ Party before he fled in 2002.
Now, it’s 2011 and he is preparing to hold an exhibition to speak up against the isolated North Korean regime.
His shabby art studio in Seoul was filled with paintings ranging from simple portraits in the style of North Korea propaganda ― a massive military parade and ladies in dark green uniforms ― to his own creations with an underlying message. One piece has the face of Kim Jong-il on the body of Marilyn Monroe in an iconic fluttering white gown. Small red fish swim around her.
The exhibition titled “Forever Freedom” will present approximately 30 of his works.
“Now, I want to express the freedom I have acquired (in the South),” Song told The Korea Times in his studio as to why he wants to display his paintings on North Korea.
Song left his hometown Hwanghae Province in 2002 to come to live in the South, a place he heard of where no one dies of starvation.
It wasn’t the first time for him to leave North Korea.
Together with his father, he crossed the Tumen River in 2000. Their destination was China where a relative was living.
“My family (Song, his parents and his younger sister) had nothing to eat. We collected husks of rice grain, and cooked it with some sweets. We decided that my father and I should go to a relative in China and ask for food,” he said.
The strong currents of the river during the monsoon season engulfed and carried away his father. Song, while battling the water and swimming to save his father, was caught by the North Korean border security.
“They called me a traitor, and tortured me severely,” he said in retrospect.
He couldn’t grasp why he was called a traitor. “All we were trying to do was find food.”
The authorities didn’t help to rescue his father, who was floating away in plain sight. Instead, they arrested and charged him, which then planted the seed of lingering abhorrence toward the regime inside him.
At a political prison camp where he spent the next six months, his right index finger was accidentally pierced and as a prisoner he “didn’t deserve a drop of disinfectant” so it got infected and he had to eventually cut it off.
Song said his time in the political prison camp and the way he was treated by the authorities eventually convinced him to escape North Korea.
After arriving in South Korea in 2004, he said it felt surreal.
“I couldn’t sleep at night during the first week. I asked myself whether I was in heaven,” he said. Especially, the abundant food and complete “freedom in everything” struck him the most.
In 2005, he was told his mother had passed away, and he organized for his sister, the only family member left in North Korea, to come to the South in 2007.
Song enrolled in Kongju University and majored in art education in 2003, where he gained extensive painting techniques and training. Asked whether he was nervous about a possible backlash by North Korean spies as a result of the exhibition, he answered, “There are possibilities. But if the concern was so overwhelming, I would not have done this.”
He went on to say starvation and the cruel governance by the regime is “no longer a problem restricted to North Korea itself,” urging people in the South and the world to look at the situation and acknowledge the sense of gravity.
He hopes his exhibition will help shed some light on the issue.
The exhibition will take place at the Gallery GAIA in Insa-dong, Seoul, between Jan. 26 and Feb. 1.
Gallery Gaia is 1 minute away from Anguk Station (Orange subway line) exit no.6 and 5 minutes away from Jonggak Station (Dark blue Subway Line) exit no. 3. The building is just across from the Crown Bakery. Call 02-733-3373 for more information.