Sprinkled throughout a traffic circle in a mining city along the southern tip of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, several North Korean statues depicting laborers stand guarded behind a black iron fence.

These clay-colored statues, located in the DRC city of Kolwezi, are the works of North Korean artists Pak Hwa Song and Hwang Gil Su and were commissioned despite being a potential violation of U.N. Security Council resolutions.

According to a new report by a U.S. nonprofit called The Sentry, artists under a North Korean studio known as the Korea Paekho