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Description
On Fine Art is Comrade Kim Jong Il’s work elaborating socialist ideo-aesthetic principles in the modern era. Basing his analysis firmly on the Juche idea, holding that in the socialist and communist era man as master shapes the world in accordance with his interests and gains independence from nature by virtue of fulfilling the scientific necessity of understanding it, he issues the guidance that the new outlook should thoroughly permeate works and that artists should be firmly led by and loyal to the teachings of the Party and leader. Unlike photographs, which seek to capture reality, art is shapen by the artist, imprinted with their ideals, and thus their ideological and moral education is of the utmost importance, and that in order to ensure this the artist must be inspired through interacting with the working people in their toil and life. Taking delicate care to study every field, he describes in depth the tasks which fine artists of every style — sculptors, painters, men of crafts, calligraphists, graphic, decorative and industrial artists, and fine artists involved in cinema and theatre — must undertake. On such a thing as illustrations in novels, he gave such instructions to portray the main characters during an historical period where an old society is being transformed into the new. As a student of his people, he stressed in everything certain tastes of form in conformity with Korea, a nation which has its own style of painting and favours soft, vivid and deep colours.
In an era where cultural aggression is rife in every field of bourgeois society, Comrade Kim Jong Il stood steadfast in the camp of proletarian art. Opposing the bourgeois theories of escapism and art for art’s sake, he put forward the thesis that art should imply and not be left up to the observer’s interpretation, serving the positive education of the people. Combatting abstract art and other spawns of capitalism, he forcefully stated that the new art must reflect reality from the standpoint of the successes of the movement thus far and the future to come. Always looking at it from the class angle, the Chairman of the WPK put fine art on the correct footing, ensuring that the imperialists could never use it to penetrate Korea the same way they had penetrated other socialist countries.