A silence ushers Pyongyang’s elite to-and-from the train station. It’s a somber, overcast day; below ground, a dimly lit network of ornate mosaics, statues and wall reliefs extoll the virtues of hammer, sickle, and brush. Faint reverberations of patriotic music, and the muted chatter of workers and students hang in the air. I know not their direction, nor intention, nor will.

Glen Chua’s North of South shows us an intimate portrayal of North Korea, offering perspectives beyond the oppression and desolation of the world’s most infamous authoritarian regime.

While public consciousness of the nation’s Orwellian social controls, egregious human rights abuses, and inflammatory rhetoric continues to propagate this portrayal, it also serves to conceptually distance itself, in both time and space, as an inaccessible place of secrecy, hiding at its core an undeniably human element. 

The evil is other; the other is a threat; the threat is de-humanized. But behind the secrecy is logic, beneath the facade is labour, below the silence are whispers, beyond the walls is hope.

As both observer and observed, Chua looks at territory, people, and relations to convey a sense of intimacy through distance - and through that intimacy, an affinity. Rather than close-up portraits, he relies on the everyday dispositions of people; they fill wide, vacant spaces set against grandiose architecture, blanketed by a harsh quiet, to express the connections and disconnections of life in North Korea – the banality, solemnity, fear, joy, and humanity of life under particular circumstances.