Artistic Expression Facing a Crackdown : South Korea: Artist Shin Hak Chul is just one victim of Seoul’s effort to curb unauthorized contacts with the Communist north.

Artist Shin Hak Chul landed in jail last summer because of his fans--the paper kind.

A student project to reprint one of Shin’s oil paintings on hand-held paper fans caught the discriminating eye of an art critic in the anti-Communist bureau of the Seoul Metropolitan Police Headquarters.

Never mind that Shin’s work, “Rice Planting,” was painted in obscurity two years ago. Authorities now think it glorifies North Korea by depicting a Utopian scene of smiling peasants near Mt. Paekdu, an icon of the north, and vilifies South Korea with cartoon-like images of foreign imperialism being shoved into the sea.

Shin, 45, a former high school teacher, was arrested Aug. 17 under the National Security Law for spreading anti-state propaganda with his brush.

Phobia of North

His legal troubles epitomize a kind of North Korea phobia that has gripped the country for six confusing months, ever since a dissident pastor sneaked into the forbidden land above the 38th Parallel on a free-lance diplomatic mission to promote the cause of Korean reunification.

A judge last Thursday handed down sentences of 10 years in prison for the pastor, Moon Ik Hwan, and his companion on the journey. Authorities also arrested several other illicit travelers, including a woman university student who traveled to Pyongyang, the North Korean capital, to attend the World Festival of Youth, which was hosted by the Communist regime last July.

And an opposition lawmaker, who went to North Korea last year and is now on trial, claimed in court the other day that he was drugged and tortured by intelligence agents into confessing to espionage. Even South Korea’s top opposition leader, Kim Dae Jung, has been indicted for violating the National Security Law by allegedly failing to inform authorities of the lawmaker’s trip.

Although the recent spate of unofficial contacts with North Korea raises some legitimate national security concerns--the two Koreas remain technically at war and are engaged in a shrill propaganda contest--the Seoul government’s crackdown has some chilling overtones. Some critics contend that the government is lapsing into an old practice of rationalizing human rights abuses under the banner of keeping North Korea at bay.

Freedom of speech and of the press are under attack. Shortly after lifting a ban on literature about North Korea in a new spirit of reconciliation last year, authorities began seizing such publications and arresting those who dared to print them. On Sept. 28, a Seoul court sentenced the head of a progressive think tank to 18 months in prison for possessing copies of North Korean books.

“Perhaps some of the bans have been reinstated, but I don’t think we have returned to the old days,” said Lee Hong Ku, minister of the National Unification Board. “Although there are some restrictions, there has not been a government decision to change policy.”

North Korean newspapers and books remain available to the public at open stacks in government libraries, he noted.

Yet, despite a series of amnesties under the administration of President Roh Tae Woo, prisons are once again filled with dissidents--the Justice Ministry reported to the National Assembly in September that 695 people were jailed on security-related charges during the first eight months of the year. Among these political prisoners were a number of writers and artists such as Shin, whose apparent offense was to provide grist for the North Korean propaganda mill.

“This is something we haven’t seen for a long time,” said Ed Poitras, a Methodist missionary and educator based in Seoul for more than three decades. “There’s been a lot of opening up in artistic expression over the past few years, but recently it’s beginning to turn around--there’s a resurgence of political censorship. There have been some ominous signs.”

5 Artists Arrested

Also in August, authorities arrested five artists in connection with a series of murals depicting scenes from popular revolts in Korean history, from a farmer’s uprising in the Yi Dynasty to the 1980 citizen’s rebellion in the provincial South Korean city of Kwangju. Their leader, Hong Sung Dam, 34, faces espionage charges for sending slides of the murals to Pyongyang, where they allegedly were shown during the youth festival.

Hong and another defendant claim they were tortured while in the custody of the Agency for National Security Planning, formerly known as the KCIA. A forensic pathologist from Seoul National University who examined Hong testified that the artist had bruises that were the result of a recent “battery and kicking.”

Government officials insist they are adhering to due process in enforcing the letter of the National Security Law, which contains a vague catchall clause prohibiting any activity that might encourage or further the North Korean cause.

“Any arrest or detention was made strictly by the law--these people weren’t snatched away illegally,” Park Shin Il, a government spokesman, said. “With so many people openly violating the law, it has to be enforced.”

But in the case of Shin, the man who painted the happy farmers, the government demonstrated its broad discretionary powers to interpret artistic expression.

Investigators divide the painting, which is framed in a Garden-of-Eden canopy of fruit and birds, into two parts--north and south.

At the top of the composition, children frolic, peasants dance and people appear to feast on a bountiful harvest near a hamlet of thatched-roof houses representing, according to police, the birthplace of North Korean cult leader Kim Il Sung. At the bottom and in the foreground, peasants plant rice and push into the sea a scrap heap of images: Uncle Sam clinging to a missile, a Japanese geisha, a Coca-Cola bottle.

“It’s not art but rather propaganda for North Korea,” said an official in the Ministry of Culture and Information. “It depicts North Korea as a paradise on Earth.”

Shin has maintained that he had no such symbolism in mind.

“Their interpretation is absurd,” said Kim Tae Soon, the artist’s wife. “He only wanted to portray happy and peaceful farmland without the garbage of industrialization.”

Prosecutors are expected to act soon to indict Shin for the painting, which was reproduced on a calendar before police caught students attempting to print it on the paper fans.

Paradoxically, the ideological crackdown on suspected sympathies for North Korea came not long after President Roh made a dramatic proposal in July, 1988, to usher in a new era of peace and reconciliation between the two Koreas.

Roh proposed opening trade and fostering citizen exchanges, albeit under government supervision, and encouraged a free and open debate on reunification, a topic that was once taboo in the south. A bubble of optimism and anticipation reached its peak in early February, when the founder of the Hyundai Group, Chung Ju Yong, made a government-authorized trip north to discuss opening economic ties.

Chung’s initiative was aborted, along with a trickle of inter-Korean trade and a bickering series of border talks, when the government felt itself losing control over the fragile process of detente in the wake of dissident pastor Moon’s unauthorized visit to Pyongyang.

Lee, the unification minister, said that the atmosphere has been spoiled by a “united front offensive” on the part of the North Koreans.

“They try to find people who will agree with their politics and bring them to the north to use them for propaganda purposes,” Lee said.

Indeed, radical student rhetoric at many campuses parrots the North Korean line on reunification and embraces Kim Il Sung’s ideology of juche , or self-reliance. But a degree of frustration and confusion over the government’s northern policy appears to have magnified the flirtation with enemy thought.

In a positive sign, Red Cross talks resumed at the border truce village of Panmunjom Sept. 27 in an effort to resurrect a north-south family visit program broken off in 1985.

Lee said the government will proceed cautiously and retain tight control over a gradual transition between confrontation and conciliation on the peninsula. But he conceded that the Roh administration has sent out some mixed signals.

“I don’t deny there’s some confusion,” Lee said. “We’re trying to minimize it . . . but sometimes we don’t know ourselves what (we’ll do) two steps from now.”