Nick Bonner and Dominic Johnson-Hill have notched up 20 years in China, and you don’t stay anywhere for that long unless you really like it, but that doesn’t stop them having a cheeky sense of fun when it comes to old-school Socialism’s rose-tinted view of reality. No-one does propaganda quite like the communists, and the cream of the crop are the artists of North Korea. A team of recently re-purposed painters from Pyongyang – formerly conveying the Kim regime’s party line but now designing food packaging – have been employed by Nick and Dominic on a project which imagines how the Mao-era propaganda machine would have represented the China of today and tomorrow.
Dominic’s streetwear company Plastered 8 is a fan of retro propaganda imagery, and Nick’s Kyoro Tours helps tourists navigate the mysterious realm of the DPRK, so they were uniquely placed to make it happen. The pair gave the North Korean artists sketches of buildings such as the Herzog & de Meuron-led Bird’s Nest Olympic stadium, OMA’s remarkable CCTV Building and other modern and futuristic developments and let them imagine the rest – with little idea what they were drawing having never seen such things before, the Koreans applied their painterly spin-doctoring to try and make sense of it all. The Beautiful Future is the result, a collection recently exhibited at Beijing Design Week in which crops grow abundantly in the shadow of the television centre, party officials are jolly sorts who like to have a disco boogie with the general populace, processions pass like conga lines through offices and of course, everyone looks so incredibly happy.
Disco Night to Enhance the Day
Bird’s Nest, Home of the People
KTV Give us a Voice
CCTV Tower with Bountiful Harvest
Water Cube for Clean Air and Healthy Life
City Migration
Office Culture for Prosperity
All images © Nick Bonner of Koryo Studio
and Dominic Johnson-Hill of plasteredtshirts.com
