Glen Chua’s series offers us intimate perspectives of North Korea beyond the image of oppression and isolation. While public consciousness of the nation’s Orwellian social controls, horrendous human rights abuses, and inflammatory rhetoric furthers this portrayal, it also serves to distance itself as an inaccessible place of secrecy and mystery, hiding at its core an undeniably human element. The evil is other; the other is a threat; the threat is de-humanized. But holding the hammer, sickle, and brush emblematic of the Communist regime, are the mother, father, daughter, and son. Chua’s images convey intimacy through distance - and through that intimacy, an affinity. Rather than close-up portraits, he relies on the everyday dispositions of people; they fill wide, vacant spaces set against grandiose architecture, blanketed by a harsh quiet, to express the (dis)connections of life in North Korea – the banality, solemnity, fear, joy, and humanity of life under challenging circumstances.