FATHER AND SON DWARF COMMUTERS
North Korea is free from commercial product advertising. With no product advertising, you would think there wouldn’t be a need for roadside billboards. However that’s not the case, there are billboards, but they only promote one “product” or “brand”; the “brilliance” of the Kim family.
Throughout Pyongyang, along with the rest of North Korea, you can hardly travel a kilometer without seeing Kim Il Sung’s face or portrait somehow within a propaganda poster, statue or monument.
There is no commercial product advertising, but that doesn’t mean billboards are not trying to sell something. In North Korean town squares and on roadsides the billboard murals sell only one product; the “brilliance” of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il. Every village and town have a Kim mural immortalizing the Kim dynasty. The billboards are impressive works of art, each being an enormous mosaic of tens or perhaps hundreds of thousands of small ceramic tiles.
Massive Mosaic Billboards
The most massive mosaic billboards to be found in the country are on the rise of Jangdae Hill above the Sungni underground station on Pyongyang’s metro network. The giant portraits of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il dwarf commuters as they enter the metro station and offer a daily reminder of the central role of the Kim dynasty in their nation’s story.
In most nations, the era of erecting huge monuments to political ideology ended with the dissolution of the Soviet Union. In a rush towards change, most large images of communist leaders and heroes were toppled or consigned to scrap yards. North Korea has not only steadfastly resisted the trend to dismantle and remove the images of the Kim family members, but it is also accelerating their construction. The need to continuously promote the cult of personality and the regime sees the country being awash with artistically impressive and grandiose monuments.
The Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il mosaics are a short stroll north of Kim Il Sung Square in central Pyongyang. Initially, there was a single mosaic billboard of Kim Il Sung at Jangdae Hill. The second mosaic featuring Kim Jong Il was added in April 2012 as North Korea mourned his death a few months earlier.
The smiling face of each leader is framed by mokran (Magnolia sieboldii), the national flower, and captioned with slogans to remind citizens that the two Kim leaders will remain with them as their comrades forever.
