Mansudae Master Class

2013 - Photography (Photography)

For the last few years, Che Onejoon has been focusing on the relationships between African countries and North Korea. He has attempted to interpret the ongoing Cold War in the Korean peninsula from a new geopolitical perspective. His resulting body of work focuses on the memorial monuments, statues and architectures that were built in 13 different African countries by North Korean government. Not often talked about, these “gifts” represent North Korea’s strategies using art as propaganda tool to gain support of African dictators in worldwide instances such as the United Nations. Though presumed to blend native African art, the monuments actually display more of North Korean socialist realism. The project is named after North Korea’s massive creative agency called Mansudae Art Studio established in 1959 by the order of Kim Il-sung to build monuments and statues for free, in Africa but not only. Che’s Mansudae Master Class project is a culminated study on cultural diplomacy, military alliance, translated forms of socialist realism, and images of utopia. Che’s photographs are frontal views of the monuments built by North Korea in the different African countries. Yet, the artist detaches the monuments from their original contexts so it becomes difficult to know where these architectures are located: in Senegal, in North Korea, or elsewhere. For example, t he African Renaissance Monument (2014) features the monument built in 2010 in Dakar, capital of the Senegal, a gigantic bronze statue to herald a new era of the continent.

Che Onejoon started working with photography in mandatory military service as an evidence photographer for the South Korean Combat Police recording different incidents for proof. Working with film, photographs, installations, and archives, Che’s research-based works deal with specific places of Korean society that connote the social and political changes that penetrate modern to contemporary history of the Korean peninsula. Studying the ruins of militarized modernity, Che presents the traces of erasures as sites of negation, disorder, and desertion.

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