Visual History of Korea

Springtime in Pyongyang
Inside the DPRK’s Post-Pandemic Reality

By Hyungwon Kang

Pyongyang — April 2026

While much of the world focuses on conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East, the Korean War—which began in 1950—remains quietly unresolved. Held in check only by a fragile 73-year-old armistice, millions on both sides of the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) continue to live under a perpetual state of war.

As a bilingual, Korean-born North American photojournalist, I have spent decades documenting this divided peninsula. After more than three years of negotiations following the publication of my book, Visual History of Korea, I finally received word in early 2026 that my entry had been approved for an independent journalism project documenting Korean history and culture on the northern side of the peninsula. My work carried no editorial conditions; access to historical sites and photography documentation of Korean culture depended only on whether those sites were generally available to the country’s own citizens.

When I crossed the border in April 2026 for a 14-day reporting trip, I stepped into a historical void. Following the COVID-19 pandemic, North Korea had sealed its borders almost completely. To the best of my knowledge, I was the first Western journalist to visit the country since its prolonged closure.

There is a saying in Washington, D.C., attributed to former U.S. President Gerald Ford:
“Anyone claiming to be an expert on North Korea is a liar.”

Walking through the capital, I reflected on those words. Global understanding of the DPRK is deeply limited, compounded by the fact that so few Western journalists possess Korean-English fluency, historical context, or direct reporting experience inside the country. Because media coverage routinely treats North Korea as a political abstraction, I wanted to bring more balanced firsthand observations of its people.

My immediate impression was clear: Pyongyang was back to business—visibly functioning, and in parts unexpectedly prosperous by outside standards.

Privately owned vehicles caused traffic jams in front of major hotels, while Audis, flagship Lexus SUVs, and Toyota Land Cruisers signaled renewed economic activity. On the streets, battery-powered bicycles capable of traveling nearly as fast as cars outnumbered traditional bicycles. Gone were the diesel, smoke-sputtering buses of the past, replaced by battery-powered public transit.

Newly constructed neighborhoods featured North American-style setback layouts, complete with dedicated bike lanes, pedestrian walkways, and manicured green lawns. Public gatherings filled Kim Il Sung Square, and many locals told me I was the first foreigner they had met since the pandemic.

Yet beneath this surface normalcy, I observed a striking and historically consequential ideological shift.

For decades, North Korean rhetoric emphasized “one people” and the ultimate goal of reunification. During my visit, however, terminology associated with “reunification” or a shared ethnicity with the Republic of Korea had vanished from the public lexicon. Books, maps, and dictionaries containing such language were absent from shelves. Bookstore staff quietly informed me that major digital reference materials were being revised and were temporarily unavailable on the country’s intranet. The erasure of the reunification dream appeared systematic, deliberate, and historically profound.

Leaving the capital for the countryside offered a different window into the state’s resilience. The contrast with my reporting visits in 1995 and 1997, when I documented the horrors of the famine for Los Angeles Times, was stark.

In the 1990s, mountains were stripped bare for cooking fuel by a starving population. Today, those same hillsides are heavily forested under strict conservation laws. In rural fields, modern fuel-delivery trucks operated alongside aging tractors and traditional ox-driven plows.

All hands on deck

Spring planting was in full swing, revealing the “all hands on deck” nature of this society. City residents are required to spend at least one month a year assisting with agricultural labor; under the spring sun, urbanites worked side by side with local farmers. Even ancient traditions are adapting: many ancestral burial mounds have been relocated to mausoleums to free up scarce land for crop production.

Yet amid omnipresent state slogans calling for “Toward a new victory!” (새로운 승리를 향하여!), signs of a changing childhood emerged. Kindergarteners dressed in colorful outfits looked little different from children in Seoul. At one point, I encountered a young boy in Pyongyang reading a Korean-language edition of Harry Potter. He proudly told me how much he was enjoying the book.

Photojournalism is universal language:

Photography often reveals contradictions more intuitively than ideology. A picture is a universal language, worth a thousand words in the eyes of the beholder.

Firsthand documentation remains vital to photojournalism and critical thinking; it fills in missing pieces of knowledge and builds a bridge of credibility between the media and the public. Beyond the political abstractions, I saw a society using every resource at its disposal to re-emerge from pandemic isolation. It was a complicated reality: a country still at war, still isolated, still changing—and unmistakably alive in the spring of 2026.

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Hyungwon Kang is a Korean American photojournalist, columnist, author and two-time Pulitzer Prize winner. Kang reported on North Korea in 1995, 1997 and 2026. Kang is the author of "Visual History of Korea," and "Seonbi Country Korea, Seeking Sagehood," and his ongoing Visual History of Korea project documents Korean history and culture across all of Korea for global audiences.