David Howe: Beloved Leader
David Howe is an interdisciplinary artist based in New York.
Painting team: Dana Pakman, Fernando Rangel, Alfredo Plot, Shuyang Zhou.
The Beloved Leader series takes direct inspiration from North Korean propaganda paintings rarely seen outside the DPRK. When I encountered these images I was struck by the contrast between their insidiously saccharine, buoyant, “Disney-colored” affect, and the cold reality of the world’s most severe totalitarian state. The iron-fisted Kim Il Sung (Great Leader) and Kim Jong Il (Dear Leader) were portrayed as kindly mother/ father figures, nurturing and protecting their happy innocent people.
I found a parallel contrast between Mark Zuckerberg’s naively nerdy robotic enthusiasm and his unbreachable control of one of the world’s most powerful companies. To portray him as the “Beloved Leader”, I borrowed several aggrandizing formal gestures from the source material: the legendary leader, often noticeably taller than his comrades despite his actual height, is flanked by attractive, propaganda-friendly archetypes who look to him for inspiration and guidance. The characters seem more like heroic statues than actual human beings. And the compositions all focus on glorifying the Leader.
To meticulously recreate the painting style of North Korean workshops with multiple artisans, we assembled our own “painting factory” here in Bushwick, staffed by a team of virtuosic painters able to replicate this uncanny aesthetic.
