This dissertation examines the period from the end of World War II in 1945 to 1979, investigating how commemorative sculptures in China and Korea organized state narratives and collective memory through specific commemorative mechanisms under the shar...
This dissertation examines the period from the end of World War II in 1945 to 1979, investigating how commemorative sculptures in China and Korea organized state narratives and collective memory through specific commemorative mechanisms under the shared condition of Cold War culture. Following the establishment of their respective regimes, both countries institutionalized commemorative sculpture as a visible medium of state ideology and a form of public monumental art, employing it as a key apparatus for constructing political legitimacy, historical orthodoxy, and imagined futures. Departing from the premise that Cold War culture was not merely a historical backdrop but a structure of visual governance that simultaneously constrained and enabled commemorative practices in both countries, this study analyzes the political and social functions performed by commemorative sculpture.
To this end, the study poses three central questions. First, how is political power reconstituted through visual form? Second, how does the state transform abstract ideology into a visible and experientially accessible social order through the public sculptural form of commemorative monuments? Third, through what commemorative mechanisms do Chinese and Korean monuments organize state legitimacy, collective memory, and identity, and what structural similarities and differences emerge under the shared condition of Cold War culture? Methodologically, this research employs a multidisciplinary approach, combining the analysis of literature and institutional materials on Cold War culture and commemorative policy, visual and semiotic analysis of major monuments, typological comparison of representative cases, and on-site observation of key commemorative spaces.
The dissertation is structured as follows. Chapter 2 examines U.S. and Soviet Cold War cultural strategies and the Cold War order in East Asia, and on this basis establishes a shared analytical framework by outlining the political attributes of Cold War–era commemorative sculpture, the artistic expression of ideology, and mechanisms of collective memory formation. Chapter 3 focuses on postwar China, reviewing cultural and literary policies, the reception and transformation of socialist realism, and systems of sculptural education and collective production, before analyzing major types such as monuments to state leaders, collective heroic figures, and revolutionary and war-related commemorative forms. Chapter 4 examines political and cultural institutions and public sculpture policies during Korea’s First Republic and the Park Chung-hee regime, analyzing the visualization of anti-communist nationalism and developmentalist discourse through monuments to patriotic martyrs, war memorials, and democratic symbolic sculptures. Chapter 5 compares the two countries along four axes—theme (commemorative subjects and codes of legitimacy), visual style and rhetoric (symbolic systems, body politics, and visual composition), space (power-centric spaces; cultural-educational spaces; spaces of construction and development; commemorative and memorial spaces), and recontextualization (removal, relocation, re-commemoration, and contestation)—to elucidate structural similarities and differences.
The findings reveal that despite differing political systems and ideological orientations, China and Korea shared several core commemorative mechanisms. First, in the selection of commemorative subjects, both emphasized narratives of nation-building, revolution, and war to assert regime legitimacy, constructing collective memory around the “body sacrificed for the state” through a combination of leader statues, anonymous heroes, and collective representations of the people. Second, in terms of sculptural style, both adopted heroic and monumental representations of the human body grounded in socialist realism or academic realism, employing monumental proportions, upward gazes, and pro-active gestures to present disciplined bodies and idealized models of citizenship. Third, in spatial deployment, monuments were concentrated in power-centered spaces and symbolic urban sites—such as plazas, axial boulevards, national cemeteries, and city gateways—thereby forming mechanisms through which state narratives were repeatedly internalized via everyday movement and ritual practice.
At the same time, notable differences emerge within the shared structure of Cold War culture, reflecting divergent national discourses and positions within the international order. Chinese commemorative sculpture emphasized collective heroic imagery centered on the Monument to the People’s Heroes and Tiananmen Square, foregrounding the abstract subject of “the people as a whole” within an integrated revolutionary narrative. By contrast, Korean commemorative sculpture visualized anti-communism, developmentalism, and the U.S.–Korea alliance through a more dispersed constellation of commemorative spaces organized around patriotic martyrs, anti-communist warriors, and democratic activists. In sum, this dissertation positions the study of Cold War–era Chinese and Korean commemorative sculpture not as a simple quantitative comparison, but as an analysis of the similarities and differences of commemorative mechanisms operating under a shared structural condition. By elucidating commemorative sculpture’s function as both an ideological state apparatus and a site of collective memory, the study offers an analytical framework and theoretical foundation for comparative research on public art and Cold War visual culture in China and Korea.