Statue export ban hits at Pyongyang’s soft power, hard cash
PYONGYANG, Korea, Democratic People’s Republic Of — With somewhere around 4,000 artists and staff, the Mansudae Art Studio, a huge complex of nondescript concrete buildings on a sprawling, walled-off campus with armed guards in the heart of Pyongyang, churns out everything from watercolour tigers to mosaics so large they seem to depict a race from another, taller planet.
But its statues — the really big, bronze, monumental ones on foreign shores — are what appear to have caught the attention of the U.N. Security Council.
In one of the odder items on the list of things North Korea can’t export under United Nations’ sanctions, statues were explicitly listed for the first time last month when the Security Council approved a raft of punishments in response to Pyongyang’s latest nuclear test, which it conducted in September.
To those familiar with the North’s exports, the move to ban statue sales wasn’t entirely a surprise. It’s one of the few things other than coal and natural resources, exports of which were also heavily restricted under the new sanctions, that North Korea can still find a market for abroad.