Quite a while ago we did a post here about the decor style of North Korean homes. I had my curiosity sparked by something or other, and posted what little I could find via Google. In the few years since that post it seems that North Korea is becoming the most photographed totally-closed-to-journalists country in the world, and today I enjoyed a short but interesting piece by Guardian journalist Oliver Wainwright about how the face of its public spaces is changing. It seems that the rule of Kim Jong-un isn’t just about an oppressed people and a weird haircut – he is also gradually making-over the municipal spaces designed to display North Korea’s independent strength with something altogether more cosy. And even more kitsch.

Quite how Olly Wainwright has gathered these images is not made clear in the article, but I enjoyed his observation that “the young, McDonald’s-munching Kim has ushered in an era of brightly coloured synthetic interiors that project a childlike image of carefree wonder, as if Disney’s imagineers had been put in charge of the decor.” The candy colours and motifs of blossoming flowers serve to conceal the cruelty and poverty that is a feature of real daily life there.

And yet, and yet, ideology aside, there’s something about these interiors that I rather like. Maybe it’s just all the pink. There’s that aesthetic that looks like they’ve blown an awful lot of money in one of those furniture shops on the Old Kent Road where you can buy a bed shaped like a white plastic swan. And also maybe because, strange though it seems to Western eyes, the use of childlike motifs isn’t really a Korean invention – in Japan for example grown men can be great big fans of teenage girl groups and the fire brigade logo is a teddy bear. This difference in taste wasn’t invented by Kim Jong-un, it’s just that applied to his dictatorship it becomes really weird and chilling. Take this design drawing, below.

Looks like it was drawn by a 7 year old My Little Pony fan, right? When instead it’s produced by these guys at the Paektusan Academy of Architecture, Pyongyang:

The more you look the more mysterious these images become. I’ll leave you with two pictures of a hauntingly empty National Drama Theatre, which looks as if it’s been made out of Crawford’s Pink Waffers – appropriate for a performance of one of the state-approved five “great revolutionary plays” indeed.

All these images are taken from Oliver Wainwright’s excellent North Korean Interiors Tumblr.