Decoding Dictatorial Statues

Following Kara Walker’s installation in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern, and the protests and pulling down of statues in recent months, we can look to Ted Hyunhak Yoon’s insightful project to examine the representation of our heritage in public space and examine whose history is placed on a pedestal, while also considering the visual rhetoric of the ‘statue’ itself.

A collection of images and texts revolving around the different ways we can look at statues in public space, Decoding Dictatorial Statues looks at the importance of positioning and physical features in public statues and examines the codes statues use in terms of their materiality, their role as media icons and their voice in political debates.

In addition to these Hyunhak Yoon’s visual narratives, a collection of authors – Erika Doss, Leonor Faber-Jonker, Florian Göttke, Jintaeg Jang, Jo-Lene Ong, Martijn Wallage, Karwan Fatah-Black, Fabienne Rachmadiev, J.R. Jenkins and Tycho van der Hoog – contribute a wide range of perspectives in essays on the subject. Statues from different eras, located in different parts of the world, are the starting point for these dissections, as they examine questions such as:

What links an outbreak of cultural vandalism against a 200 year old Vietnamese devotional subject with the toppling of Saddam Hussein's statue in 2011?

Why would a recently liberated African country opt for a North Korean company to tell its history?

How can we define historical value in regards to the removal of colonial monuments in South-Africa, The Netherlands and the United States?

Ted Hyunhak Yoon is a graphic designer∙researcher based in Seoul and Maastricht. He graduated from the Royal College of Art in London, UK with an MA Visual Communication, From April 2017, he has been a participant of a residency programme in Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht, NL.

• ISBN 9789491677984