About This Project

Seong Jae Kim

Statue of Boy

In 1968,  South Korea’s dictatorship disseminated a heroic story of a child killed by North Korean guerillas and ordered all elementary schools to build statues of him. After the dictatorship’s fall, people regarded the story as propaganda, and many statues were removed. Few remain in closed schools in the remote countryside today. I tried to find and capture them, which became a symbol, not of the victim of the tragedy, but of the cold war.