Decoding Dictatorial Statues

A response to urgent concerns about public monuments commemorating dictorial histories

In the words of Hannah Arendt, “Half of politics is image-making, the other half is the art of making people believe the image.” From South Africa to Charlottesville, heated discussions over statues, their removal and their vandalism frequently make the news. Decoding Dictatorial Statues, a project by Korean graphic design researcher Ted Hyunhak Yoon, is a collection of images and texts exploring the visual rhetoric of statues in public space. How can we decode statues and their languages, their objecthood and materiality, their role as media icons and their voice in political debates?

The book responds to urgent concerns about the representation of our heritage by not only asking us to examine what history gets put on a pedestal, but also to consider the visual rhetoric of the statue itself.

A timely and informative contribution to our current on-going national discussion over Confederacy statuary and Religious Monuments in public places, "Decoding Dictatorial Statues" is an extraordinarily thoughtful and thought-provoking study that is unreservedly recommended for personal, social activists, community, college, and university library Contemporary Social Issues collections and supplemental studies lists. (Midwest Book Review)

In his new edited volume Decoding Dictatorial Statues, Ted Hyunhak Yoon, a graphic designer based in Seoul and Amsterdam, deciphers the relationship between monuments and politics through a legible archive of human gestures used by sculptors, across time and geographic location, in the creation of dictatorial statuary, an ill-defined subset of memorial sculpture that seems to range from depictions of Roman emperors and US presidents to Lenin and Walt Disney. (Cara Jordan Brooklyn Rail)

Together, the editorial pieces, Ted’s photos and found stock-imagery, combine to create a Dutch-inspired design aesthetic which questions the symbolism of existing statues. (Jyni Ong It's Nice That)