Dart Festival Review : War of Art

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War of Art shows a group of Western artists’ attempt to build bridges between themselves and some North Korean peers. Whether they achieve that is debatable, but the film’s success in showing it is not.

You have to admire the optimism of Morten Traavik and his merry band of artists who head to North Korea to set up the “DMZ Academy,” a cultural exchange project captured by director Tommy Gulliksen in the 2019 documentary, War of Art. You admire them, or, if you’re as cynical as I am, you immediately question the entire project’s futility. 

Any attempt to get under the skin of the 21st century’s last hermit kingdom, to share ideas and collaborate with its people, is doomed to failure. The choreographed charades that Westerners are treated to on filmed visits there offer nothing more than a strange pastiche of normality, and by and large, that’s what we see in the film. Which is not to say that the project is a total failure, it’s just that while its intention is to build bridges between fellow artists, it encounters the same problems that all others have met before in the DPRK: censorship, locked doors, short, strangling leashes and a manicured, manipulated view of life under the watchful eye of Kim Jong-Un.

War of Art, however, differs from most North Korean exposé documentaries for two reasons. Firstly, they make it plain that the documentary is in no way an attempt to catch the system out, to ghoulishly grab some juicy footage of starving slums or the regime’s iron fist. Indeed, it follows the Traavik’s project with some independence, rather than being the point of the entire group’s trip there. The DMZ Academy’s raison d’etre is to “Rage within the machine rather than against it,” not to expose North Korean authoritarianism but to work alongside the people of the country, showcasing their art and, ultimately, their humanity. In following the project, Gulliksen achieves this, maybe even more successfully than Traavik.

The other difference is a more unique one: the inclusion of art in the mix. Traavik has previous for this concept—his 2016 “documentary-musical” Liberation Day follows Slovenian alternative rock band, Laibach, as they become the first western band to play in North Korea. The Norweigan’s second trip to the DPRK is as the artistic director of seven international artists who are in Pyongyang to attend the “first-ever contemporary arts symposium and workshop in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.” The plan for the DMZ Academy is for the Western artists to present some of their work to their North Korean counterparts at the country’s University of Fine Art, and vice versa. It’s a novel concept, surely the first instance of such an exchange in the DPRK’s history, now that their chubby emperor is slowly pulling down the drawbridge. 

It’s obvious, too, why the Western artists involved were so enthused by the project; study a nation’s art and you see its culture laid bare. But coded messages and even basic hidden meanings are nowhere to be found in North Korean art. While Traavik’s team specializes in art made from human body parts, anthropomorphized sound systems and the abstract end of abstract painting, their North Korean peers specialize in propaganda. There isn’t really any art in the DPRK which doesn’t serve a political purpose; it is not made for its own sake but for a very literal goal, and spurred on by a fear of what might happen if what the artist produces isn’t perfect. The mocked up exhibition halls are plastered with Soviet Realism on steroids, all rockets blasting and leering uniformed comrades ready for revolution—clinging on to kitsch from a by-gone nuclear age.

This vast formal gulf doesn’t stop the cultural exchange in its tracks though. The motivations of the Western artists seems to be that if they can just speak to the North Korean painters, weavers and musicians, they might find some common ground. That’s where the censors come in. At every possible juncture, the team is prevented from having real discussions with the people they meet, both through language barriers and an inability to get away from their nannying guides. There is no real symposium at the DMZ academy, only a short presentation to a handful of hand-picked, exclusively male artists in some hidden back room, where the art on show has all been closely examined under the DPRK’s magnifying glass.

Despite their guides’ will to stifle, the human interactions between the North Korean interlocutors and the Western team are actually War of Art’s most intriguing points. One guide in particular appears to have a knowledge of art, or at least an interest in it, that seems genuine, even if his conception of what it should and shouldn’t be for seems somewhat skewed to our Western eyes. “Can you imagine something that is perfect?”, Norweigan painter Henrik Placht asks one, after being challenged on his creative style. The answer, you can see in the guide’s eyes, is yes—the leader, the Kim family and the ultimate goal of global proletariat revolution are all perfect, so their artistic manifestations must be the same.

“Yes,” however, is not something that we hear much from any of the interpreters’ mouths. (Unless it’s an invitation to Karaoke, that is—they all oblige, and more than once.) The dark cloak of censorship hangs heavy over the film, especially in the Korean entourage’s point blank refusal to show certain pieces in the symposium, despite prior assurances. But this censorial shroud is not always opaque—the film’s lighter points appear to burst through it, or sneak out in spite of it. The interpreters reveal themselves to be so much more than the brainwashed zealots that, we are told, dwell in North Korea. These are real people with dreams and aspirations, even if they have been quashed and repressed by lifelong servitude to the supreme leader and a transcendental communist ideal.

The most telling moment comes during a conversation between the Chinese artist Quentin Shih and the main guide. After sitting, smoking and joking for a while, Shih asks about the other’s dreams, his ambitions in life. The Korean’s immediate response is to refute such capitalist trivialities, that material aspirations are anathema to him as a good honest communist. But Shih presses on, insisting there must be something he longs for: a wife, children, a better job. In his long, ponderous hesitation—cautiously studying Shih all the while, as if checking whether a stasi agent lurks beneath—the guide betrays a flicker of the base human emotions of ambition and hope.

This humanizing element is where the film really succeeds, even as Big Brother’s looming presence means conversations are consistently cut short, and directorial independence stymied. Fear is instinctual in North Korea, and a defining emotion of everyone we meet. There’s a twitching speed to their movements, like when Austrian sound artist, Nik Nowak, innocuously leaves their orbit for less than a minute, and they come running to grab him, terror at the consequences should a Westerner see something he isn’t meant to. Or at another moment in the music school, when Shih tries to take a picture of a young and incredibly talented student. She initially obliges and steps up to have her picture taken, before a lackey storms in to call an immediate end to it. We’re then left with a harrowing shot of the student alone, head bowed, frozen, prostrate, terrified. They know what the consequences are in North Korea. They all do. And by their reactions to authority, we do too.

The DMZ Academy is proved ultimately futile. When censorship is that pervasive, a cultural exchange is never going to achieve a whole lot, and the contrast between the bright eyed, bushy tailed artists who arrive in the hope of collaboration, and the jaded, weary ones who return to their own countries proves that in a single shot. But War of Art as a film manages to divorce itself from the symposium, standing apart in what it achieves. The documentary retains the cultural exchange’s powerfully positive intentions and honest depictions of real North Korean people, who are presented with autonomous thought if no agency to do anything with it. Look passed the locked doors and conspicuously empty restaurants, scratch beneath the veneer of party loyalty and automated anti-western phrases, and you end up seeing a little more than you think.

Harry Stott is a regular contributor to the Barcelona Metropolitan covering Brexit, local political and social issues as well as the music scene. He recently received a B.A. in music from the University of Leeds, and now writes and produces radio content for a number of organizations in Barcelona and beyond. You can read more of Harry's articles here.