North of the Border

Hi there,

Sorry I haven't blogged in a couple of weeks, folks. This semester has taken off right from the start, which is good, because all of my classes are really interesting and enjoyable. Unfortunately, this has left less time for me to blog. However, after this week, I have something for you that I have been working on for a long time. I envisioned this work expressly for the purpose of putting up on this blog.

Anyway, you're probably aware that Kim Jong-il, the authoritarian communist leader of North Korea, died recently. This happened two months ago, so now it's "old news," but I figured I'd talk about this nonetheless. I thought I would get this completed sooner, but you know how things go. Duties come up in your life, and tasks you want to get done end up getting pushed back. Thankfully, this work came together last Sunday afternoon, and here it is now for us to discuss. Anyway, there's a certain clarity to events that comes with examining them after the frenetic news coverage dies down.

Kim Jong-il became the de facto President of North Korea back in 1994. Kim promoted a policy of "military first" for the allocation of the country's financial resources. All the while, North Korea has been among the poorest countries in the world. For several years after Kim took power, North Korea had a terrible period of famine, lasting from 1994 to 1998. If you read the 1997 piece from The Economist I just linked to, you'll notice they point out that people had little knowledge of the famine for a few years. This is important. This is because virtually no news came out of North Korea. What we heard was what they wanted us to hear.




This was the initial announcement of Kim's passing. The newscaster's hammed-up crying was the common reaction throughout the country. North Korean citizens had to be as sad as possible about his death; this determined what place in society they would fit into. This was a test of their loyalty to the state.

The important part of this is that those people did accept that reality, the reality where Kim Jong Il was God. They believed that he always bowled a 300, or shot a 30 every time he played golf. This is the level of worship Kim Jong Il enjoyed. All these years, though, Kim was able to demand the most lavish amenities. He hired the finest chefs in the world, from Japan, and Italy, to cook just the simplest foods for him, according to the Telegraph of London. This was while that same famine was occurring, in which as much as 10% of the North Korean people may have starved to death.

However, Kim, according to what records exist, had very sophisticated hobbies. Apparently, he had thousands of cookbooks in his library. He was also a well-known film buff (he apparently had a thing for westerns). He had a collection of thousands of his own movies, and according to the video below, he had been an aspiring director himself.



What does all this say? Kim Jong Il definitely was a character. Now there are people that are characters, that they have very distinct, very out-of-the-ordinary, personal interests and behaviors. Some people have unusual personalities for the better, some for both better and worse, some definitely for the worse. Kim Jong Il was definitely that way for the worse. You hear this stuff about his keen interest in filmmaking, and you think (or I think) "What if he had ended up being a director?" You know, the way Hitler had failed to become a painter. So if he had somehow been able to become a director, who knows? You might have been watching one of his movies right now. Just a thought.

Why should I be talking about all of this, though? I mean this drawing has nothing to do with politics. It is just a representation of a small fishing village on the Yalu River, the North Korean border with China. I brought all of this up to get, and to give you, as the reader, just a small window into this faraway, distant, scary place. I had gotten the idea before to just do a landscape drawing, but this time it would be of someplace in North Korea. Then when Kim passed away, suddenly North Korea is front and center again, and I got the opportunity to do that project, and explore all of this with you, the reeders.

I was able to find a good representation of this area using Google Earth pictures, which was where I got the idea for the tugboat in the foreground. Therefore, it is very limited in its representation. I will own up to that right now. I do not claim that this drawing is the end-all, be-all of what we need to understand the situation in North Korea, or in any other distant country I might represent in my future works. Hopefully, though, it can be a good starting point. I wanted to find some part of it that was less political, and more recognizable. In landscapes, the manmade aspects of the scene are de-emphasized.

I got this image of a village, but mainly of a riverbank, with the mountains in the background, and a cold wind blowing. So I tried to evoke that image on the page here, using the visual, three-dimensional tools I had. I also found the writing on the red sign on the fence from Google Earth photographs of the area, so I don't know what it means. However, what the letters mean isn't the focus of this. Like a saying I first heard the other day goes, believe none of what you hear and half of what you can see. I really think that saying touches on something, that's why I shared it then. The point of mentioning it is that the spoken, written messages are being taken out of this encounter, and here, I wanted to get just a visual piece of this distant, abstract place. I hope you thought this was an informative post. I'll have some more intriguing material soon!

See ya, and keep wondering, folks!