Turning propaganda on its head in South Korea
| Seoul, South Korea
鈥� A local, slice-of-life story from a Monitor correspondent.
For Song Byeok, getting out of his homeland came at a price. The soft-spoken artist left North Korea in 2000 to find food as famine ravaged large parts of the country. Caught trying to cross the border, he spent seven months in a North Korean prison camp. After being amnestied, he successfully sneaked into China. A year later, he arrived in Seoul, South Korea.
Before fleeing to China, Mr. Song was a propaganda artist. In a rural studio south of the capital, Pyongyang, he created grinning portraits of 鈥淒ear Leader鈥� Kim Jong-il and vibrant billboards of revolutionary workers and peasants. Now safely in Seoul, he has turned the regime鈥檚 ubiquitous propaganda imagery back on itself with a series critical of Mr. Kim.
鈥淲hen a person鈥檚 born, their first human right is freedom, and every individual has their own freedom,鈥� he says. 鈥淭he only country that doesn鈥檛 have any of these things in the whole world is North Korea.鈥�
