Mick Hartley

It's certainly well timed. Just as North Korea hits the headlines, the MAK Museum in Vienna is hosting an exhibition of art from the Dear Leader's socialist paradise:

More than 100 oils, water colours and traditional Korean ink paintings, dating from the 1960s to the present day, have been brought from Pyongyang to Vienna's MAK Museum for Applied Arts and Contemporary Art for the show, called Flowers for Kim Il Sung; Art and Architecture from the Democratic People's Republic of North Korea.

The works show beaming farm women feeding geese and ducks, or plump, rosy-cheeked children wandering through fields of flowers. There is also a soldier lying in the snow, grinning as he looks up from his gun, untroubled by cold or fear.

Speaking at the opening of the exhibition, the director of the Korean Art Gallery in Pyongyang, Han Chang Gyu, says he hopes these artworks "with their depiction of the heroic daily life of our people" and their "lively reproductions of our beautiful scenery", would lead to a "better understanding" of North Korea.

Works include "We are the happiest children in the world", by Kim Song Min, from 1995 – just about the time when a million or so died in the famine while the Dear Leader stocked up on the finest culinary treats flown in specially from Paris…but hey, let's not be negative or judgemental:

All the artists represented are state employees, whose task is to communicate the "correct attitudes and values".

The curator of the exhibition, Bettina Busse, says that does not diminish the pictures as works of art.

"Of course the art is very clearly related to the ideology, but it is not true that it is more propaganda than art. They are really very good works. We want people to be a bit open-minded."