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 usually delineate because the world's largest. It churns out information pieces and has long been the outlet allowed to produce portraits of the Kim dynasty.
Among the employees at the Siem Reap museum are some twenty North Koreans, some of a small proportion of people from the isolated country who ever see life within the outside world.
A few North Korean ladies work in a bequest shop selling Mansudae acrylics and oils from between $100 to $2,000.
"I've been here 6 months," said one lady, declining the supply of an on-camera interview.
"The Cambodian employees are getting to know their North Korean colleagues."
"We try and perceive each other, swap stories regarding our culture," Sor Sei Leang, a Cambodian told visitors there.
"They're trying to find out Khmer too so that they can visit market and talk to people. They ask us how to say hello, thank you. That kind of thing."
