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[Photos © Ted Lau]
Lau says that he was inspired to visit North Korea by the work of German photographer Andreas Gursky, who visited the country in 2007 to view and photograph the Arirang Festival. Here's what I wrote when I visited the Gursky exhibition at the Hayward in 2018:
Then there are the images from North Korea's Arirang Festival – that exercise in de-indivualisation and totalitarian mass control on a huge scale, from the regime with the worst record on human rights on the planet. It's somehow not surprising that Gursky was drawn to this grotesque spectacle. He's said that he's not interested in the individual, and here he gets a chance to prove it….
You can read about his 2007 trip, The Axis of Evil: Traveling to North Korea with Andreas Gursky, here.
“I never claim the picture is a depiction of reality,” says Gursky. “It’s always a combination of invention and reality, an interpretation of reality. The impressions in your head get mixed up after one and a half hours of Arirang. A picture is not good because its subject is good, but because something has been made discernible, something that gives the picture direction. But I never give up the link to the documentary aspect of it.” What happens when North Korea’s stage direction collides with Andreas Gursky’s? Maybe the product of two negative integers is positive this time around, resulting in the most authentic depiction that can be made of North Korean reality today.
Hmm. He's so caught up in his self-regarding philosophy that he doesn't see what's right in front of him. Does he think his great skill and vision is sufficient to neutralise the stench of fascist spectacle on show here? The resulting pictures are, I'm sure, images that Gursky's North Korean minders would have been very happy with. Read the piece in full to see how they went out of their way to help the great man capture the full Arirang spectacle. And Gursky clearly considers these images to be successful. There are two Pyongyang pictures in what's billed as a retrospective show.
Are we in Leni Riefenstahl territory? Maybe that's too strong. But it does leave, for me, a bad taste in the mouth.
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