Phnom Penh Post
The new $10 million
Grand Panorama Museum outside Siem Reap town is being built with funding
from North Korea. Photograph: Thik Kaliyann
For more than a year, mystery has shrouded a museum in Siem Reap. The
facts have been few and the details sparse. What’s known is that a
North Korean company invested about $10 million for construction, and
that artists from the hermit kingdom flew in to paint and sculpt.
But what exactly they were planning remained uncertain. Officials
provided boilerplate descriptions, and journalists who visited the site
during the construction stage were waved away or barred from entering.
Restrictions, however, seem to have eased, and on a recent visit, a Post
reporter got a glimpse of what’s being called the Grand Panorama
Museum.
“It will attract a lot of visitors, and it will show the world about
Khmer culture and history,” said Kim Sromoul, a construction manager
with a flair for marketing and promotion. While walking around the site,
he paused at a looming portrait of a smiling Buddha. He pointed at it
and noted that it “looks like a photo, but it isn’t”. “It is a painting
drawn by North Korean artists, and it is the smile of Avalokiteshvara,
or ‘Lord who looks down’, who embodies the compassion of all Buddhas.”
You don’t often hear “North Korean” and “compassion” together in the
same sentence. But little is normal about the museum except its
traditional iconography. Visitors to the sprawling site, located about
three kilometers from the city of Siem Reap, beside the grounds of a new
ticketing office for the world-famous Angkor Archaeological Park, will
be greeted by a Naga guardian head at the entrance.
Once inside, there are panels showing the geographical layout of Siem
Reap and the temple complexes, and a 3-D show explaining stone cutting
and transportation.
The centrepiece of the Grand Panorama Museum is, not surprisingly, a grand panorama.
Financed by Mansudae, the North Korean construction firm that has an
arts arm specialising in overseas projects, the panorama is a detailed
mosaic roughly 120 metres long and 13 metres high. Three portions of the
painting depict battle, construction and daily life around the time
that Angkor Wat was built in the 12th century.
“The North Korean painters, hundreds of them, they painted the three
main episodes,” said Chuch Phoeurn, secretary of state for the Ministry
of Culture and Fine Arts, in a telephone interview. “The first one is
the battle of the reign of King Jayavarman VII, the second one is the
establishment of the Bayon temple, the Angkor temple, and the last one
is the daily life of the people in the Angkorian period.”
Asked if Phoeurn saw anything askew with North Koreans painting
paeans to a history that they don’t share, he pointed to other
international projects in Siem Reap, adding that Cambodians from the
Royal University of Fine Arts contributed to the panorama.
“In the area of the Angkor complex, there are different kinds of
museums – there are museums held by the government of India, there is a
museum held by a Japanese NGO, and [at] the other museum, the National
Museum in Siem Reap, artists of the Thai people co-operated with the
Royal Government,” he said.
“So for us and North Korea in this area, we share the experiences
between the North Korean artists and the Khmer artists to build up this
panorama museum.”
Virtually all of the public artwork on display in North Korea is
produced by some of the 4,000 employees of Pyongyang-based Mansudae Art
Studio, according to an official gallery website that contains the names of hundreds of artists.
Among the structures pieced together on home turf is a 20-metre
bronze statue of Kim Il-sung; the 170-metre Juche Tower, hailed as the
tallest stone tower in the world; and mosaics adorning subway stations
in Pyongyang.
But the Grand Panorama Museum hardly represents the first time that
Mansudae has travelled abroad. According to the Daily North Korea news
website, the company has also built highly controversial – and highly
lucrative – monuments and public works in several African countries,
including Angola, Namibia, Senegal and the Democratic Republic of Congo,
netting more than $150 million in government contracts.
As with the North Korean Pyongyang restaurants and the handful of
other businesses dotting the Kingdom, it is believed Mansudae profits
are all funnelled back to the government in North Korea, where the
company got its start in the late 1950s.
In Africa, the structures follow the studio’s bigger-is-better mantra.
Though independence and revolutionary monuments built in the style of
social realism seem to make up the core of the company’s efforts, it
has also erected sports stadiums, military museums, and presidential
offices.
The museum in Siem Reap appears to fall somewhere in the middle. It
trumpets a long gone golden era of Cambodia’s history while operating as
a practical place open to millions of tourists who visit Angkor Wat
every year.
Anyone familiar with the museum is sparing with details, including
the most key one for visitors, the opening date, which a Ministry of
Culture official placed near the end of April. A North Korean Embassy
representative contacted by phone said he did not know much about the
museum, and hung up. Bun Narith, the general director of the
organisation overseeing Angkor Wat, said dryly that the Grand Panorama
Museum would play an important role in explaining to visitors about
Cambodia’s Angkorian history.
So why did the North Koreans build it in the first place? Analysts
fell back on the historically close ties between North Korea and
Cambodia. The late King Father Norodom Sihanouk enjoyed his own palatial
residence in Pyongyang, and, according to political analyst Chea
Vannath, King Sihanouk was once protected by a crew of North Korean
bodyguards.
“Maybe this is to have a counterbalance with the South Korean
influence in Cambodia, because everybody knows worldwide that King
Father Norodom Sihanouk was the best friend of Kim Il-sung, and they had
a long-lasting friendship,” she said, adding that the museum would also
be a version of soft diplomacy from a country that is more known for
its human rights abuses than its artwork. “It’s to show another angle of
North Korea.”
The royal relationship theory made sense to Carl Thayer, professor
emeritus at New South Wales University in Australia. Thayer said in an
email that Sihanouk could retreat to his Pyongyang palace when he wanted
to escape political pressure back home. But it remains a theory, one
among many.
“Perhaps the current leadership wishes to keep alive their version of
this legacy. It is sheer speculation on my part, but perhaps someone in
or close to the royal family tossed up the idea first and/or encouraged
the North Koreans. Finally, perhaps the North Koreans have some
admiration for Hun Sen’s leadership style and foreign policy,” he said.
“As with all things North Korean, outsiders can but look through a dark glass and imagine what they think they see.”
To contact the reporter on this story: Thik Kaliyann at
newsroom@phnompenhpost.com
Joe Freeman at joseph.freeman@phnompenhpost.com
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