Andreas Gursky's series Pyongyang, produced following his visit to North Korea in 2007, is a visual documentation of the country's Arirang Festival, a weeks-long annual event, named after a Korean folk-song. The event involved highly choreographed gymnastic performances held in celebration of the birth of the late founder of North Korea, Kim Il Sung. Gursky captured the event from considerable distance, turning the performance of the gymnasts and acrobats into a visual spectacle, freezing their gestures into a composition that straddles the line between representation and abstraction.

Pyongyang IV is the most intensely chromatic out of the five images which form part of the series, capturing the rigorously coordinated movements of the dancers, arranged over several rows which gradually recede from the viewer. The colours of their uniform costumes conveys a chromatic rhythm to the composition, almost resulting in abstraction.

Despite the feminine and graceful portrayal of the dancers holding pom-poms, their extensive number and the military precision of their movements can be seen as a demonstration of political might. The vertical and horizontal lines created by their bodies' alignment draws the viewer's eye towards the inflated globe at the upper center of the composition, which shows a North Korea-centric perspective of our planet in which neither Europe nor the West feature.

To avoid any political allusion, the artist does not explicitly portray the Korean leader or any image of society, as he stated: "Pictures in which the propaganda is too obvious would not be suitable because they are far too narrative. I just want to show that this is a kind of ersatz religion, a staging of collective happiness, and how it looks" (Andreas Gursky, quoted in 'Pyongyang: A State of Exception', in Exh. Cat., Basel, Kustmuseum, Andreas Gursky, 2007-08, p. 73). Gursky focuses specifically on the abstract patterns underpinning this spectacle, in line with his pioneering investigation into the patterns that are inherent to humanity and its activity. As opposed to his other works, in the present work the collective patterns are not unconscious, but are imposed upon the individual by the totalitarian regime.

In this complex and breathtaking composition, Gursky reduces each individual to a single forming part of the vast apparatus controlled by the State. Given the monumental scale of the work, the viewer benefits from a careful scrutiny of this pattern, which brings to light some disturbances to this carefully ordered pattern. In particular, a handful of dancers appear to be out-of-sync with their neighbors, most notably close to the globe under the main stage. Gursky's decision to capture such errors is not casual, as he exposes the fallibility of each individual, revealing the defects underlying the communist regime. In this case, the distanced glaze and extensive scale of the work enables the viewer to gain a sense of their own subscription to the structures and hierarchies of global society. For an artist who is primarily concerned with the intricacy of detail, this distance enables details to blend into one another, creating a superb illusion of painterly composition.

Pyongyang IV is exemplary of Gursky's use of manipulation, which raised a new debate concerning the question of photography's truthfulness, which first emerged in the 1860s, when it became apparent that the camera's capabilities of recording the truth could be distorted. His approach led both critics and artists to reconsider the relevance of the question of truth in photography in the age of digital processes.