Tokyo Gallery + BTAP is pleased to announce its forthcoming exhibition Happy Pyongyang 2010 beginning on. A collaboration between producer Masayuki Aramaki and Mansudae Art Studio located in North Korea, Happy Pyongyang 2010 is the first exhibition of North Korean conceptual art. Because all artists in North Korea belong to the state-run Mansudae Art Studio, a government propaganda organization that produces posters, paintings, statues and other artworks in accordance with a national agenda, there is for all intents and purposes no such thing as a solo artist. Only a selected few who have reached a state-prescribed standard are able to work for Mansudae.

In this project, Aramaki commissioned the North Korean art studio to produce a work to the theme “Beautiful Girl against the Backdrop of Pyongyang”, using social realist techniques that North Korea inherited from the Soviet Union and China, to achieve a hyper-realistic effect. Aramaki specified that that a group of artists should work competitively, with each artist assigned to one the twelve months of 2010 for which he or she should depict the meaning of happiness for that month. When arranged in order, the twelve images naturally evoke the atmosphere of Pyongyang. Treating North Korea as a world unto its own, this exhibition aims to capture for future generations the unique sense of time one feels in the nation’s capital, Pyongyang. The artists who worked on the project followed their “Beautiful Girl” piece with another work themed “Brave Young Man”.

Masayuki Aramaki
Born in Osaka in 1968, Aramaki travelled to the United States at the age of 18 and obtained a degree in East Asian Studies from the University of Maryland College Park. Aramaki enrolled in the postgraduate level at China’s Capital University of Economics and Trade and it was when studying China’s Cultural Revolution that he became interested in North Korea. Deciding to visually document North Korea from a cultural-anthropological perspective, Aramaki travelled to the country at least 25 times in the 16 years, recording around 1000 hours of video footage. In 2007 Aramaki started the “North Korea Project” in collaboration with Funky Sueyoshi (Bakufu Slump), which led him to produce North Korea’s first ever rock song by a girl-band called Murumpyo. Aramaki holds a master’s degree from Waseda University.

*image (left)
© Mansudae Art Studio