Copy-Paste Nationalism: North Korea and the Global Export of Monumentality

From the AI-generated video of a gleaming gold monument to Trump in the Gaza Strip to the recent national military parade coinciding with the president’s birthday, the current administration’s approach to memorial politics continually invites comparisons to the monuments and commemorative practices of North Korea. While news articles often offer surface-level critiques, a deeper analysis of North Korean memorial culture and statuary traditions provides essential perspective on global monument production and illustrates the role of monuments in visualizing nation-states.

For decades, North Korean art studios have specialized in the design, creation, and export of nationalistic sculpture gardens for commissioning nations. Examples can be found in Botswana, Zimbabwe, and Namibia. North Korea’s memorial export enterprise highlights something characteristic across many contemporary memorial landscapes: the desire for sameness and formulaic familiarity. Representational monuments to leaders and heroes, present in nearly every major city worldwide, underscore the current banality of nationalisms and memory production. This paper presents North Korea as a case study to examine the international demand for easily legible, representational monuments constructed from traditional materials such as marble, granite, bronze, copper, and brass. North Korea’s ready-made approach to national monuments provides useful insight on current conventions about memorial politics in the United States and abroad.