In 1968, members of a rural family, including a nine-year-old boy named Lee Seung-bok, were killed by North Korean Guerrillas. South Korea's dictatorship disseminated a story of the child's courageous resistance against the communists and ordered all elementary schools to erect statues of him. After the dictatorship's fall, people regarded the heroic narrative surrounding the statues as propaganda. Most have been removed since then, but few remain in closed schools in the remote countryside today, losing both their significance and physical presence. I tried to find and capture them, which once became a symbol, not of the victim of the tragedy, but of the ideological conflicts.
