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 by considering the visual rhetoric of the statue itself.

“Half of politics is image-making, the other half is the art of making people believe the image.”—Hannah Arendt

With text by Erika Doss, Leonor Faber-Jonker, Florian Göttke, and Martijn Wallage

Edited by Bernke Klein Zandvoort

Designed by Ted Hyunhak Yoon

Published by Onomatopee, 2019

Softcover, 192 pages, 1 duotone and 210 b&w images, 6.75 × 9 inches

ISBN: 978-9-49-167798-4