In their 1972 book, Scalapino and Lee Chong-sik called North Korean cultural space a “desert of unalleviated mediocrity and monotony.” For all its harshness, the definition fairly accurately described the cultural atmosphere in the DPRK of the 1970s.

The situation only changed in the 1980s, when the DPRK leadership initiated a process of unheralded liberalization in all spheres of North Korean life.

But the formative years of North Korean culture were marked by consistent attempts by intellectuals to create another version of socialist realism: more versatile and human-oriented, more entertaining and open to the world. These attempts were rudely aborted,