This is exciting work, dripping with irony, using political propaganda to show its own emptiness:

Soon after his arrival in 2001 he enrolled at Hongik, a leading arts college in Seoul, where his socialist realist technique put him at odds with prevailing notions of what constituted art. One of his professors called his political imagery “cheap, fit for old barbershops” - a reference to the Cold War years when South Korean barbershops often were decorated with crude propaganda posters with slogans like “Let’s exterminate Communists!”

Now that imagery, with its subverted content, addresses issues central to Korean identity.

“His work touches the national trauma of the divided Korea,” said Kim Dong Il, a visual arts critic and lecturer at Sogang University in Seoul. “His style is North Korean, but when he brought it to South Korea, it became something completely different. The children’s smile in his paintings becomes too idealized to be real. A smile is not always an expression of happiness and can even mean the opposite.”