Leiden University Libraries Digital Collections

This digital database consists of scans of over 1,000 printed North Korean posters from the private collection of Willem van der Bijl. Assembled from the turn of the century over the course of a decade, the collection contains posters from the time of the Korean War (1950-53) right through to the 2010s. Attesting to the thriving poster culture of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea), this digital archive is a visual legacy of the DPRK’s ideological, political, economic, social and cultural history.

Posters matter in North Korea. They are an integral part of the country’s propaganda infrastructure, which seeks to socialize the population into docile citizen with politically correct conduct, thought, values and emotions, who pledge total allegiance to the country, ruling party and Great Leader. Although borrowed from its model and mentor, the Soviet Union, North Korea’s poster culture came into its own over time, just as politically, socially and economically, North Korea evolved from a Stalinist state socialist polity at the time of its founding in 1948 into a hyper nationalistic pseudo-socialist hereditary autocracy.

Instruments of control and discipline, posters aim to inform, affect, and in their most rousing form, stir viewers to action. The message cannot be divested from the form; text and image mingle in a graphic design that seeks to achieve optimal communication. The power of a poster stems from its sloganesque directness and idiomatic imagery. The readability of a poster is achieved through compositional simplicity: stark and simple colours and contours, and the repetitive use of symbols and props.

In addition to the poster image itself, these printed posters contain non-diegetic information. Though not consistent throughout the collection, this includes the name of the poster artist, the publisher, the printer, the production date, and/or the print run and serial number.

As a diachronic archive, this collection accompanies the ideological, political, economic, social, and cultural twists and turns the party/state has taken over the years. It offers a peek into North Korean imagery as it was created for and vetted by the authorities before being presented to the North Korea people. Addressing directly and indirectly individual citizens, the posters provide a glimpse into North Korean cultural norms and its socially constructed imaginary. The details of the artwork document unexpected representations of material and nonmaterial aspects of the North Korean everyday.

Disclaimer: by their very nature, these posters are normative and unidirectional; analyzing these posters cannot ascertain how viewers appropriated them.