Mick Hartley

A tale of two artists. First up, Philip Toledano, with his new series of paintings Kim Jong Phil:

It occurred to me that being an artist is a great deal like being a dictator.

Just like a dictator, I must live in a closed loop of self-delusion. A place where my words and ideas always ring true. A gilded daydream of grandiosity. There can be no room for doubt. I must be convinced that I have something vital to say. I must believe that the world is waiting in keen anticipation to hear my message.

For my palette, I've copied pre-existing dictatorial art. Paintings from North Korea, statues of assorted dictators (Kim Il Sung, Laurent Kabilla, and Saddam Hussein). I had these works re-created in China, and each instance, I've replaced the great leaders with myself.

The pictures, sometimes, have amusingly deflationary titles – I love the smell of adulation in the morning – and to the extent that Toledano is making fun of himself and his fellow conceptual artists, well, all to the good. But still, really, it's all a bit…I don't know….pointless. He's clearly amused by his little conceit, but I'm not sure what's supposed to be in it for the rest of us (a not unfamiliar feeling when dealing with conceptual art). We don't, after all, need the kitschy posturings of these dictators to be deconstructed. They were always, for us, manifestly ridiculous.

For others – those who were the original targets of these posters – the struggle to escape their cheap power has a significance of an altogether different kind. Here's artist no. 2: Song Byeok.

Posing in front of one of his anti-North Korea paintings – this one depicting Dear Leader Kim Jong-il’s head atop the provocative body of Marilyn Monroe – North Korean defector Song Byeok believes he is finally free from the communist brainwashing that has eaten into his soul.

Song, 42, who escaped North Korea in 2002, had moments ago waved his hand and slipped away in refusal when he was asked to be photographed against the life-size painting that he said carried a message for the North Korean despot: open or be opened.

The fear of denigrating the Dear Leader – for whom the former North Korean propaganda painter had worked as part of an elaborate cult of personality – had briefly struck him.

But after gazing for a moment at the chimerical painting that he takes a special liking to, Song strode back to it and said with a nod, “Why not?”

“For a long time, I honestly believed Kim was a great leader and that my country was better off than others,” Song said in an interview in his workroom, which was little more than a cubicle inside a tiny run-down shopping mall on the outskirts of Seoul.

Song, a native of Hwanghae Province in the North’s western coastal region, said he began to realize he was living a brutal life when he tried unsuccessfully in 2000 to cross the border into China with his father to seek economic help from their relatives in China.

Deepening food shortages had led to the suspension of rations for his family, even though he had worked as a propaganda painter for a local communist party bureau for seven years.

“The crossing cost me my father,” Song said tearfully, recalling his father who waved his screaming son away even as he was swept away alone by the currents. “We underestimated the rains that swelled the river.”

Desperate for help, Song ran to the border guards on patrol, only to be beaten unconsciously and confined for months.

“I remember them saying, ‘Why didn’t you just drown with your father?’ I was then locked up for attempting to defect. That was the breaking point. I decided to leave the country for good,” said Song, who lost a finger while in prison due to injuries he had suffered earlier….

“Now I want to devote my art to letting the world know that everyone, including North Koreans, deserves to be free,” he said, clad in stylish blue jeans and horn-rimmed spectacles.

Stacked against each other under a few fluorescent lights, his paintings include one that shows a mass rally in Pyongyang’s huge Kim Il Sung Square while a dove gazes over it.

The dove, along with a butterfly, is a repeated theme that Song says symbolizes freedom in his works….

Song said North Koreans are living a life “worse than that of a butterfly.”

“Millions of North Koreans are unable to enjoy what a single butterfly can: freedom. As an artist, I consider it my duty to inspire this question among both North and South Koreans.”