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Solo exhibition of the North Korean artist Sun Mu
The North Korean artist Sun Mu is taking up a one-month residency at the Meinblau project space and will be showing a selection of his paintings from 2018 - 2023 alongside new works. Visitors will thus receive a representative presentation of this artist, who is unique due to his origins and biography.
Image gallery
SUN MU "Lied des Friedens"
The artist Sun Mu was born in North Korea in 1972. There he received academic training as a traditional communist propaganda painter. The great famine of the 1990s drove him to flee via China, Thailand and Laos to South Korea. There he completed further studies in fine arts and has since lived as a freelance artist in Seoul.
To protect his family remaining in North Korea, he hides his face from the media public and adopted the pseudonym "Sun Mu". It means something like "without border". The choice of the stage name implies his longing for a united Korea. On the Korean peninsula after the war, only the armistice agreement of 1953 applies; a peace treaty still does not exist.
Sun Mu's background and education have a great influence on his work; in terms of content, everything revolves around peace and the reunification of the two Korean countries. In his paintings, he deals above all with the different systems of the two states.
He uses the pictorial language of propaganda painting to develop a subversive aesthetic and often employs irony, humour and symbolism.
Many of his paintings seem like a propaganda variant of pop or street art, but are always linked to a call for resistance and an appeal for freedom and humanity. In North Korea, Sun Mu is regarded as the most important artist, especially because of his satirical portraits of the Kim trinity (Kim Il Sung, Kim Jong Il and Kim Jong Un), who are worshipped like gods.
Il and Kim Jong Un), but in South Korea, too, his paintings have often fallen victim to state censorship.
