Last chance!!! Ends this Sunday!!!
Treasures from the Hermit Kingdom stun in the MADE IN NORTH KOREA exhibition.
On show at the house of illustration til Sunday 13th May
2 Granary Square, King’s Cross, London N1C 4BH
Theres a feeling that the West has little protected its skills and training in the fine arts. So this beautiful exhibition of contempory social art comes as an elegant poke in the eye. My first thought landed on the lack of visual pollution that exists in North Korea. Thr exhibition is quick to point out that these posters underline the service and use that modern goods will offer the public, they are in fact soothing and hopeful, whereas our adverts in comparison are hounding and pretty much there to remind you of what you lack.
The colours are indeed subtle, while having that POP art engery that comed with use of gorgeous primary colours ( Warhol would have seriously love this show), theres thr unique Korean contribution to the palette of sulpher, torquoise, lilac and indigo.
Something to note is the refined combination of several graphic langauges working in near invisabley and harmony. Theres the wonderful blocks of letters zoom out toeards you like movie searchlights, landscapes, food stuffs and products are described with the economy of the Japanese wood cuts that so inspired the French impressionists. The visual language shifts to a crisper graphic dedign as well as a highly Edward Hopperesque 50s feel. Tgeres something very generous about the space created in these works that evokes the generousity of Ametican 50s design. And then often individuals portrayed in thr posters are given admirable attention they too have a wonder Hopper quality.
This wonderful show is highly recomend. It offers a great mediation on the use and meaning of materialism in the 20th & 21st centuarys, whether objects really are at the center of our lives and essentially own us or whether they serve us and don’t become towering oppressive idols. Dare I say it, you do come away thinking hoe much happier we would be if we could could swap more of our useless things for the representations that the posters represent. Afterall a great deal of the power of commercial good is the supposed signified status and the demarkings of our tribal idenities and interests that they are meant to perform. And its always questionable to whether what we’re buying into is no more than a faulty voodoo that promised a pagan fetish magic but can never be better than a damp squib. Theres a momement in one of the posters where trainers various items and school bags with a North Korean childerns cartoon project outwards in infinite rows, going along that line into the posters vanishibg point these blurr into white light I find that fantastically interesting, how desire is returned to its origin or that its reality is tangible and in our hands in our choice to create and assign in the world. I very much enjoy how the ontology and the aesthic of POP, high and low culture are re-made as truely plastic.
Details close up.
The orginal poster paintings are so pleasing to see in the flesh, examples of the dervived mass produced poster are sometimes placed side by side for comparision so that the differnce from photo stock and printerd inks can be studied, you don’t regular het to closely scrutinize this differnce and see exactly how far reproduced imaged are from the original.
House of Illustration
Until 13 May 2018, 10:00am – 6:00pm
https://www.houseofillustration.org.uk/whats-on/current-future-events/made-in-north-korea-everyday-graphics-from-the-dprk
2 Granary Square, King’s Cross, London N1C 4BH