National Folk Museum exhibition reveals everyday life in North Korea before division

What life was like in the northern part of the Korean Peninsula, even before the country was divided after liberation from Japanese colonial rule, remains largely unknown to the outside world, including South Korea. 

An exhibition opening on Wednesday, “Zero: The North Korea,” offers a rare glimpse into everyday life in the region.

Held at the National Folk Museum of Korea in central Seoul, the exhibition displays 316 folk items gathered in those northern regions before liberation, most of which are from the museum's own archive located in Paju, Gyeonggi, and are being exhibited for the first time. The show also comes days before the 81st anniversary of Korea's liberation from colonial rule, which falls on Saturday.

"When you look at the quantity of material from the northern regions that we actually hold, it's not much — against our total collection of 180,000 pieces, [316] is not a large number," Jang Sang-hoon, the museum director, said during a press conference at the museum on Tuesday. "So this is partly an act of self-reflection. How much of an effort have we made to remember a folk culture with which we share so much? This exhibition began from that question."

The title, playing the many meanings of the word “zero,” took some deciding. Curator Ha Do-kyeom, who came to the project after writing a report on the everyday lives of North Korean defectors, wanted a word for absence that was not quite absence.

“We first thought about gong, emptiness in the Buddhist sense,” said Ha. “That describes how there is air in the air, which is not the same as nothing being there, and you cannot say it is not there either. Mu, nothingness, was difficult to explain, and gong was more difficult still, so we asked what other language might carry it, and zero was what we landed on.”

Or to put it another way, the title indicates that the museum is starting from a base of zero.

The heart of the show is the Haeju white porcelain moon jar. Eighty-eight of them stand together in one towering case at the gallery — the practicality of stoneware paired with the porcelain's exquisite blue-and-white designs, with peonies, fish, chrysanthemums and — on one — an owl soaring through the air.

“The Haeju jars and trays were made in Haeju, South Hwanghae Province, but they were used in quantity by middle-class households in the capital and all over the south,” Ha said. “A great many people had no idea that was where the things came from. Go to Jongno District in central Seoul today, into the old houses, and the jars are still sitting there.”

This leaves the question of what to name all of these objects that have seemingly lost their home after the division of the two Koreas.

“When Koreans today want to refer to the area above the armistice line, how we ought to name it is honestly a difficult matter,” Jang said. “The easy way is bungnyeok, the northern land, which is how it tends to get put in literary language. What we wanted was a chance to look at the folk culture of the region as a region — the culture of the years before liberation, before the division — and not an attempt to handle the material culture of the socialist state.”

Roughly 110 pieces gathered after the division from the northern region are on display, too. The collection includes embroidery from studios in Pyongyang and celadon reproductions made as recently as the 2010s, set beside the older material. Three Haeju masks appear as well, from a mask-dance tradition broken up under Japanese rule.

“Zero: The North Korea” runs through Feb. 14 of next year. Admission is free.

BY LIM JEONG-WON [lim.jeongwon@joongang.co.kr]