In a large parking zone outside Cambodia's celebrated Angkor Wat temples complex stands a brand new museum built by North Korea, a part of a lucrative charm offensive by a hermit state exporting its monumental art to a handful of foreign allies. "They feel like they're back in the time of Angkor", said Yit Chandaroat, of the Angkor Panorama, relating the world heritage site that includes the remains of the various capitals of the Khmer Empire, dating from the ninth to the fifteenth centuries. Behind him stands the museum's piece Diamond State resistance, a huge 360-degree panorama that sixty three North Korean painters from the state-owned Mansudae Art Studio toiled away on for more than a year. The paintings portray the battles of the direful Khmer Empire at the apogee of its power in the eleventh and thirteenth centuries and the construction of Angkor Wat. The museum is over a friendly gesture. With 1,000 artists on the books the studio is usual...
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