North Korea’s Socialist realism discourse in the 1950’s began to object naturalism as a bourgeois decadent art. North Korea’s early socialist realism theorists strongly opposed to the opinion that “Like a camera, Realism is a detailed copy of the reality as it is.” Objectivism, pursued by writers who focus on literal and mechanical descriptions of facts, was what they saw as “bourgeois decadent art”
However, such an attitude inevitably emphasizes the personal sub-jectivity of artists and writers. In this context, we can understand that the ‘critics of schematism (attacks on the cliche and stereotypes of Art and literature)’ of North Korean literature in the late 1950’s. However art critics and literature theorists who stressed “the combustion of the subjective spirit” frequently had to face reverse attack. In other words, the debaters who stress the subjectivity of individual artists were criticized as those who are obsessed with revisionism or bourgeois individualism. In this situation, North Korean artists have needed to choose between schematism and revisionism. As a result, Many artists have taken the schema and the norms as their own. North Korean critics at the time criticized such an attitude as a dogmatism, but it was safer than being criticized as a bourgeois revisionist. That is why the Socialist art of those days, including North Korea, was established solely as a positive art for a regime and dominant ideologies. Art critics shouted, “There is no forbidden theme in Socialist Realism Art,” but in reality there were many prohibited topics.