By MICHAEL Z. WISE


VIENNA - A sprawling exhibition of propagandistic North Korean artworks has garnered condemnation and suspicion since it opened here in May. The opening took place as international tensions flared over North Korea’s alleged sinking of a South Korean naval ship.

This is the first time that the secretive totalitarian state has sent a large number of its artworks outside its sealed borders.

Until now the country’s cultural proclivities have been known primarily through television broadcasts of bizarrely choreographed dancing and gymnastics extravaganzas performed by up to 100,000 adults and children. The show, at the Museum of Applied Arts, gives another perspective of a dystopia where many citizens scavenge for food and are subject to forced labor, torture and other repressi on.

In the eerily upbeat paintings, dutiful workers beam with joy; well-nourished children laugh in dazzling sunlight. “We Are the Happiest Children in the World” is one surreal title. An image from 2000 ? just after a famine estimated to have killed three million ? depicts the portly dictator Kim Jong-il lifting the lid off a steaming pot in a kitchen laden with succulent meats and fruits. “The Supreme Commander Kim Jongil Deeply Concerned Over the Soldiers’ Diet,” reads the caption.

“Is it ethical to show the propaganda works of a dictatorial regime?” a correspondent from the former East bloc asked the exhibition’s curator, Bettina M. Busse, at a press preview on May 18. Ms. Busse told Czech Television: “There seems to be a misunderstanding of the topic. We’re concerned with culture.”

The German newspaper Die Welt condemned the exhibition, “Flowers for Kim Il-sung,” as “obscene.” The paper said that in a “terror regime” like North Korea there is “no perceptible visual art according to an acceptable understanding of any sort.”

The museum is doing everything possible to avoid offending the lending nation. The exhibition and catalog are devoid of any critical text . “It’s totally clear that if we were to have contextualized this exhibition, as some wanted us to, the exhibition would not have taken place,” said Peter Noever, the museum’s director.

The North Koreans themselves had trouble grasping the appeal of their artwork to the Viennese. “There were anxieties,” Mr. Noever said. “The North Koreans feared it was propaganda against North Korea.” No money was paid for borrowing the works.

Many Austrians, meanwhile, have accused Mr. Noever of burnishing the image of the regime in Pyongyang. The Austrian finance ministry refused to provide insurance protection for the loaned art. “This exhibition shows a covert sympathy,” said a ministry spokesman. Mr. Noever provoked further furor with his catalog essay lamenting that “our Western ideological lenses cloud, if not entirely distort, the view of other realities” and urging museumgoers to “bid farewell once and for all to Eurocentric and culturally imperialistic attitudes.”

Mr. Noever has demonstrated a flair for attention-getting projects. “Noever is no fool,” the Viennese daily Die Presse said of the North Korean spectacle, “but rather the leading Austrian exemplar of leftist radical chic.”

But many Korea experts believe that the show may help promote dialogue. “It is important to engage in cultural projects with different countries, even if the regime is one we might not like,” said Jane Portal, who heads the Asian department at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Vienna apparently retains a special allure for the North Koreans. It long served as a base for shopping sprees to supply the North Korean elite with luxury goods, according to a memoir by a North Korean colonel who oversaw such purchases before defecting to Austria. Last year Italian police blocked an Austrian intermediary from buying two yachts for Kim Jongil.

The Vienna museum’s ironic exhibition title relates to the use of flowers to glorify the North Korean leadership. A new type of begonia bred in 1988 was named Kimjongilia after him and called the “immortal flower.”

“The North Koreans don’t get the irony of it,” Ms. Portal said of the florid title, which “Many people who look at the exhibit think it’s a bit of a joke.”

But, she said, “This is the last remnant” of totalitarian societies, “the last bastion of this kind of thinking that’s bound to disappear. That’s why it’s so important for it to be seen and collected for posterity.”