Standing between intransient history and transient memories: The statue of MacArthur in South Korea

Abstract

Since its inception in 1957, the statue of General Douglas MacArthur at Incheon City in South Korea has been a robust signifier of the American rescuing mission during the Korean War that originally was meant to evoke gratitude among the South Koreans. Yet, South Korean activists in 2005 took iconoclastic actions against the statue, calling the public’s critical attention to both MacArthur’s actions and to the role of the United States during the Korean War. This case study of MacArthur’s statue reveals two processes at work: first, how a statue, in a time of transition, transforms itself from a mere signifier of intransigent history into a reflexive medium of transient memories of a past event and second, how a statue, in its surrounding space, can embrace the conflicting gestures that audiences from two different generational and ideological positions simultaneously perform. I conclude that a statue, reconfigured in time and space, has a strong potential to become a dissenting medium that effectively reemerges subversive memories to confront consensual notions of a past event.