North Korea’s Grand Mass Games are a spectacle quite unlike any other. Taking place in the Rungrado May Day Stadium – the biggest stadium in the world – the month-long event involves up to 100,000 performers taking part in mesmerising synchronised displays of gymnastics and dance.
Hong Kong based-photographer Ted Lau first became interested in the Mass Games after seeing German photographer Andrea Gurksy’s images of the event. In 2019, Lau resolved to travel to North Korea and document it himself. These photos are collected in a new book, titled Work Will Set You Free (Daylight Books).
For Lau, being a Hong Kong citizen meant that he was able to visit the country with relative ease. However, the planned trip wasn’t without complications: shortly before Lau’s departure, Kim Jong Un suspended the games after finding that a rehearsal did not meet his stringent standards. Fortunately for Lau, Jong-un reversed his decision and the games ended up going ahead.
As is the case with all visitors to DPRK, Lau was made to hire a tour guide to accompany him around the country, who controlled where he went, and who he spoke to. “There are specific rules surrounding photography,” explains Lau. “For example, you can’t take photos of construction sites, or the military […] If you take a photo of a world leader, it cannot be cropped.”
But when it came to photographing the games, Lau was able to attend and shoot with relative freedom. In one particularly surreal shot, thousands of school children sitting in the stadium’s seats can be seen using coloured flip books to create huge, shifting displays of images and words. “They’re arranged by the district, and they’re all shouting their district. The atmosphere is amazing,” recalls Lau.
While the main purpose of the trip was to photograph the games, Lau also wanted to show something of daily life in North Korea. Elsewhere in the book, there are photographs of the Pyongyang Subway, which was inspired by those in Soviet Moscow and decorated in sky blues and baby pinks.
The more mundane scenes, of workers folding blankets, or manning production lines, were prohibited, and had to be taken covertly. The tour guides would ask to see Lau’s camera regularly, and ask for photos to be deleted. But Lau got around this by backing up his photos: “You show them deleting your photo, but they don’t know you have a copy.”
While being driven round as part of his tour meant there were few opportunities to interact with North Koreans, when he did speak to people, Lau found them to be “very friendly”. “I wasn’t trying to talk to them or anything, because it’s still sensitive. But they were like to me, ‘Our country is beautiful, it’s a great country’. And it is a beautiful place – not the totalitarian side of it, but otherwise.”
Lau hopes his photographs encourage people to feel a greater sense of understanding towards North Koreans. “I wouldn’t like people to just think of North Koreans as robots or evil people, because they’re really not. They’re just people minding their own business most of the time.”
“They live their daily lives and work their routine jobs,” Lau writes in a description of the book. “Life goes on and everything is so normal.”
Work Will Set You Free is available on Daylight Books.
Enjoyed this article? Like Huck on Facebook or follow us on Twitter.
You might like
A stark, confronting window into the global cocaine trade
Sangre Blanca — Mads Nissen’s new book is a close-up look at various stages of the drug’s journey, from production to consumption, and the violence that follows wherever it goes.
Written by: Isaac Muk
“Like skating an amphitheatre”: 50 years of the South Bank skatepark, in photos
Skate 50 — A new exhibition celebrates half a century of British skateboarding’s spiritual centre. Noah Petersons traces the Undercroft’s history and enduring presence as one of the world’s most iconic spots.
Written by: Noah Petersons
“I didn’t care if I got sacked”: Sleazenation’s Scott King in conversation with Radge’s Meg McWilliams
Radgenation — For our 20th Anniversary Issue, Huck’s editor Josh Jones sits down with the legendary art director and the founder of a new magazine from England’s northeast to talk about taking risks, crafting singular covers and disrupting the middle class dominance of the creative industries.
Written by: Josh Jones
Free-spirited, otherworldly portraits of Mexico City’s queer youth
Birds — Pieter Henket’s new collaborative photobook creates a stage for CDMX’s LGBTQ+ community to express themselves without limitations, styling themselves with wild outfits that subvert gender and tradition.
Written by: Isaac Muk
The suave style and subtle codes of gay San Francisco in the ’70s
Seminal Works — Hal Fischer’s new photobook explores the photographer’s archive, in which he documented the street fashion and culture of the city post-Gay Liberation, and pre-AIDS pandemic.
Written by: Miss Rosen
The stripped, DIY experimentalism of SHOOT zine
Zine Scene — Conceived by photographer Paul Mpagi Sepuya in the ’00s, the publication’s photos injected vulnerability into gay portraiture, and provided a window into the characters of the Brooklyn arts scene. A new photobook collates work made across its seven issues.
Written by: Miss Rosen
