Art Under Control in North Korea by Jane Portal

Author:Jane Portal [Portal, Jane]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Reaktion Books
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

In fact, his emphasis on the brilliant cultural tradition of Korea, a pure and homogenous race unsullied by foreign influence, is quite similar to the South Korean archaeologists’ preoccupation with Korean ethnicity.3

However, one of the obvious and predictable differences that can be seen between North Korea’s interpretation of Korean history and that of the South is in the emphasis put on the northern kingdoms and dynasties at the expense of those located in the south. Thus, in the Three Kingdoms Period (c. AD 300–600), the northern kingdom of Koguryo is glorified while Paekche and Silla, located in the south-west and south-east respectively, are given less emphasis. The Koryo dynasty (918–1392), with its capital at Kaesong in present-day North Korea, is also claimed for the north, regardless of the fact that it encompassed the whole of the south as well. These general trends can clearly be seen in the presentation in the National History Museum in Pyongyang.

The very beginning of Korean history, in the shape of the Tan’gun creation myth, has been appropriated by Kim Il-sung’s regime. This myth was based on the name Tan’gun Wanggom, which was adopted by rulers of the Bronze Age walled town state of Old Choson in about the fourth century BC. This position of ruler was enhanced symbolically by its being said to have been descended from Hwanin, a sun god. The legend developed that Tan’gun was the product of a union between Hwanin and a bear, born in 2333 BC. Later Korean histories such as the Samguk Yusa (‘Memorabilia of the Three Kingdoms’) by the monk Iryon (1206–1289) and the Tongguk tonggam (‘Comprehensive Mirror of the Eastern Kingdom’), written in 1485, emphasized Tan’gun as the progenitor of the Korean race. In fact, a national shrine was established at this time in Pyongyang and ancestral rites were performed there.4 Belief in Tan’gun was revived periodically at times of increased nationalism, such as at the beginning of the twentieth century when Korea was being annexed by Japan, when a new nationalist religion called Taejonggyo was formed. In fact, there were periods (1895–1910 and 1948–61) when a Korean calendar was adopted with the year 2333 BC as year one.5 Kim Il-sung sought, in Tan’gun, a line of descent from the very beginnings of Korean history. He therefore approved the excavation of the supposed ‘tomb’ of Tan’gun in 1993 (illus. 76). He visited the site at Munhung-ri, Kangdong County, 38 kilometres north-east of Pyongyang, where some remains of human skeletons were discovered in a cave near a Bronze Age dolmen, and signed the plan for the reconstruction of Tan’gun’s tomb on 6 July 1994, just one month before he died. The ‘tomb’ has in fact been transformed into a huge and grand white marble mausoleum. Whoever’s bones were originally discovered in the cave, the resulting reconstruction is completely anachronistic. Built in the style of, but much larger than, a stepped pyramid tomb of the Koguryo Period (fifth–seventh centuries AD), it also has rows of tall stone figures in front of it, of the kind that did not appear until the 8th century.

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