The exhibition comes amid North Korea’s flurry of diplomacy, including ongoing talks and cultural exchanges with South Korea. South Korea’s first lady, Kim Jung-sook, called it a “meaningful exhibition [that] bridges 70 years of disconnection through art.”

“The sense of difference will gradually be resolved by contacts through these various channels,” she added.

But precautions are needed in a nation where some strongly oppose the outreach to the North by President Moon Jae-in. Each North Korean painting is displayed under tempered glass for protection from possible vandalism.

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“There has been angry phone calls to the biennale railing against the ‘red art,’ ” said the curator, B.G. Muhn, an art professorat Georgetown University who has traveled to North Korea nine times to study the country’s art.

Muhn said some of the paintings give a deeper look at modern elements of the “socialist realism” movement that reached its apex during the Cold War but still lives on in the North.

A 2015 painting by a team of six artists, “Joyfully Anticipating the Completion of the Dam,” portrays exhausted smiles of workers in a massive state construction project.

“The artists participate in the work together, eat, toil, sleep with the laborers. A work of socialist realism is [the] product of such integrated effort, beyond an artist’s personal achievement,” Muhn said.

Mansudae Art Studio, a state-linked institution that produced most of the works on exhibit, gathers top art prodigies throughout the country to raise them as chroniclers of the state.

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After churning out ideological works for the Kim family, the elite artists in their late career move on to paint landscapes, animals or portraits of ordinary people.

“Unlike in the Western contemporary art, these painters take [a] literal rather than symbolic approach in order to be easily understood by the common people. There is no art for the sake of art in North Korea,” Muhn said.

At the Gwangju Biennale, the section on North Korean art is an odd one out from six other sections showcasing contemporary conceptual art, in which the subject idea takes precedence over traditional concerns about techniques and aesthetics.

North Korean artwork is increasingly sought by collectors anticipating possible openings in the reclusive nation that could change the state-sponsored works, said Park Young-jeong, a North Korea specialist at the Korea Culture and Tourism Institute in Seoul.