“Che Onejoon’s Archive of Korea in Africa”

by Joanna Lehan

Che Onejoon's skepticism of photography has paradoxi­cally lived alongside his drive to master it. At 18 he attended the Korean Polytechnic School for its yearlong photography training, which left him wanting more academic rigor, yet grateful for the technical skills it gave him. These technical skills came in handy when he signed up for the Korean National Police for his compulsory military service. "It sounded easier than the army," Che jokes about his teenage naivete.

But once on this path, passion for the medium's possibilities took root. At 19, disguised as a journalist with a Nikon F4 around his neck, Che carried out his police duties at Seoul's largest political protests of the early 2000s. He says his job was to document unlawful activity, like the possession of weapons.

He has heard that one of his photos may have caused the arrest of a friend of a friend, a student protest leader, but it's not possible to know if this is true. Still, he began to internalize the power of photography. He also began to understand its limits. Can a photo tell a complete, complex truth?

These questions deepened as later he is exposed to the writings of French philosopher Michel Foucault, whose provocative reframing of institutions and society inflected the documentary projects Che began on his own time. Initially taking advantage of his access to non­public sites as a member of the police force, Che turned his lens on interrogation and training rooms, courts and prosecutors' offices, presenting us with dispassionate images of the stages on which power performs. Other series focused on depopulated built environments that carry the legacy of the era of dictatorship-bunkers, unseen areas of the subway system. These images excavate layers of history, presenting them in all their stark facts, at least those that are visible.

International Friendship

Che's Mansudae Master Class (2013-ongoing), though made in a wholly different geographic setting, is an extension of this impulse to capture "hidden" architecture as evidence of political activities and societal structures on the Korean Peninsula. As websites pertaining to the DPRK are mostly blocked by the South Korean government, his research on the activities of Mansudae Art Studio required an international effort. Fueled at first by a grant from the Musee du quai Branly in Paris, he found that he also needed to employ the help of French and American researchers to vault the firewall of the 38th parallel. In February of 2013 he made his first trip to Africa, to Senegal, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Namibia, Botswana, and Zimbabwe, with a cinematographer, an assistant, and his large­format camera. That summer, funded by a grant from the Arts Council Korea, he returned to Namibia, Zimbabwe, and Senegal. Returning in 2015 he traveled back to Namibia and to Gabon. He's traveled to Africa four separate times so far, and visited nine countries.

The archive of images Che has assembled is impossible to summarize in brief. In each city he visited, the structures that he has depicted represent points of history in very different countries. The inception, and the reception, of these buildings and monuments also varies significantly. Perhaps it's best to simply begin at the beginning, then.

The monument that first spurred Che's interest is Africa's tallest, Senegal's African Renaissance Monument, completed in 2010. It was a project of President Abdoulaye Wade, constructed in bronze by Mansudae Overseas Projects at a $27-million-dollar cost. The monument features a family, rendered in the highly idealized style that is the hallmark of socialist realism: the angular muscularity of the shirtless man, center, with his right arm around the waist of a barely­enrobed, shapely woman. A baby perches on his powerful left bicep, pointing up and away to the future. The anachronistic style and bombastic scale of this monument is most certainly compelling.

In Che's photograph the Monument is decontextual­ized from the surrounding landscape and architecture. The steep hill on which the statue stands, commanding the skyline, is nearly leveled from the position Che makes his photograph. To return some context and extend his documentation of this site, Che included in his project the snapshots that local souvenir photographers have made of visiting tourists from a host of African countries. These images suggest the Monument’s successful incorporation and acceptance as a site of African pride, yet don’t tell the full story of the controversy and protests from various factions, well covered by the international press, that met the monument’s construction.

This decontextualized depiction characterizes many of Che’s photographs. A notable exception is the nearly romantic photograph of the Iavoloha Palace in Madagascar. One of the earliest projects, built in 1970 by North Korea as a gift to the so-called “Red Admiral” and Kim Il Sung admirer, President Didier Ratsiraka. In Che’s photo the sprawling white palace nestled against a misty green hillside is foregrounded by farm-lands and a rundown farmhouse. But those farmlands too, were in essence a gift from North Korea, who also built agricultural waterways in Madagascar.

Some of Che’s photographs show the transformation of a site over time. Mansudae Art Studio had not yet completed the Namibian Independence Memorial Museum in the capital of Windhoek when Che first photographed it in 2013. In Che’s photograph of the exterior of the Museum, a five-story golden-yellow triangular structure, which encompasses a cylinder, its stark modern lines a purposeful counterpoint to nearby German colonial structures in Windhoek, not included in Che’s frame. An empty pedestal stands in front where once stood a German equestrian statue from 1912. When Che returned in 2015, the Museum was open, Mansudae Art Studio’s bronze statue of Sam Nujoma sat on the once empty pedestal, and Che ventured inside. The exhibits in the museum: paintings, statues – some also produced by Mansudae Art Studio — tell unflinchingly of Namibia’s brutal colonial past, and celebrate the heroes of independence. These interiors are reminiscent of the depopulated interior spaces in Che’s photos in South Korea, stages for the telling of history.

The photographic archive also includes “Gifts from Africa,” objects that Che scanned in the North Korea Information Center of the National Library of Korea. Among them are many pages of a catalogue from the International Friendship Exhibition, a museum built by Kim Jong Il to display gifts the regime has received from foreign visiting dignitaries, a typical formality. The museum intends to evidence to its North Korean visitors Kim’s global goodwill and respect.

Each page reproduced by Che is a still-life photo of a memento brought from Africa, some meaningful cultural keepsakes, others kitschy curiosities: a stuffed puffer fish from Equatorial Guinea, from the Nigerian Military Delegate an ornate white table clock shaped like a castle, which unfortunately resembles a wedding cake made in Disney World. Each gift in this catalog was photographed against surprisingly colorful, poppy backgrounds, amplifying the overall oddity of this document. Photographing this catalog was prohibited by the National Library so Che smuggled in a portable scanner, enjoying he says, this act of “stealing.” The necessary low quality of the appropriated images underscores their status as restricted.

It’s interesting to note that Che’s photographic processes are heterogeneous and have fluctuated over the course of the project, though his organizing principal, charting the relationships between North Korean and African countries, has not. He has produced a film, which has been edited to both three-channel and single-channel formats, to suit both broadcast and museum presentations. He’s made large-format photographs in black and white, and in color. He has also included additional appropriated materials: the photographs of itinerant African photographers at monument sites, and the records of North Korean workers in Africa found in the rubbish, and scans from North Korean newspapers.

Che has cited the Dusseldorf school photographers, led by Berndt and Hilla Becher, as an aesthetic influence, and this is legible in his serial, objective rendering of built structures, which point to political systems. The late Nigerian curator Okwui Enwezor in the essay for his exhibition Archive Fever, singled out Thomas Ruff from that group of photographers, which includes Thomas Struth and Candida Höfer. It is perhaps with Ruff’s interest that Che is more closely aligned than with any of that cohort. Ruff, in such series as “Machines,” made from images from an industrial catalog, and “Nudes” in which he appropriates and manipulates internet pornography, concerns himself with photographic archives, and in the limits and values of the photograph itself. As Enwezor puts it, “Ruff intervenes in the archive, making clear its status as an object of ethnographic and anthropological interest, as well as endowing it with epistemological and aesthetic functions.”1 So too, is the case with Che’s “Gifts from North Korea,” in which Che does not distinguish value between the images he made and the ones he unearthed. Each image shows an equally important facet of the cultural exchange he’s pointing to, but no image is meant to stand alone. Instead, they accrue meaning in relation to the others; it is the archive he presents for us to consider.

Built architecture is a physical fact, and also an easily-read pictorial metaphor. The African metropolis, its monuments and architecture have been recorded by scores of contemporary African photographers, and the approaches and inherent metaphors in those bodies of work make interesting points of contrast to Che’s project.

In Nigerian Andrew Esiebo’s photographs of Lagos, architecture is a system, a kind of foil to human endeavor, but one over which Lagosians ingeniously triumph. In his 2015 photo of Tafawa Balewa Square, the monuments at the gates at the former site of the colonial Race Course, are cropped and blocked from full view by the rich visuality of a busy Lagos Boulevard, lively with vendors and pedestrians. In other images of highway overpasses, the subject is the people, walking through the clogged traffic, unstoppable.

In Guy Tillim’s Avenue Patrice Lumumba (2009) the modernist built environments of post-colonial African countries are colored by the pathos of failed utopian ideas. This pathos is conveyed through crumbling infrastructure and somber colors.

David Goldblatt photographed architecture, as opposed to protests, to document the abomination of apartheid in South Africa. His book South Africa: The Structure of Things Then (1998) included photographs of churches, shops, monuments, all captured in what Goldblatt described as a “neutral optical effect.” The images often carried detailed descriptive captions that serve to educate an international audience about the function of the structure. Goldblatt’s long captions invited viewers to imagine how people lived under a regime whose racist machinations were laid out in byzantine rules, which shifted continually as apartheid was dismantled.

Che neither centers human activity, like Esiebo, nor assigns a poetic aesthetic to the sociopolitical as Tillim does, but like Goldblatt employs this neutral affect. The photos themselves don’t tell or suggest the story of the history of each structure or state, they simply present them, full frame, depopulated and decontextualized from the surrounding city, accompanied by the simple facts of their year of construction, and when they were photographed. Whereas Goldblatt’s photographs may have appeared neutral, their political statement was bold. Che, alternatively, despite what is in the photographs, is not illuminating the complex political histories of, for example, Botswana or Ethiopia. He is pointing instead to obfuscation itself, and the images, lacking in context, extend this theme.

“Gifts from North Korea” is in fact shorthand; through the 1980s North Korea did gift these monuments to countries, in a gesture of political allegiance to Non-Aligned African nations. However, as North Korea’s economic position weakened, the monuments were actually paid for and commissioned from North Korea, who had proven, through their actual gifts, that it was an exceedingly skilled purveyor of ambitious yet economical architectural projects. (As one Al Jazeera podcaster put it, with excessive glibness: “Authoritarian statues are to North Korea what modular furniture is to Sweden,”2) Some of these structures, therefore, are political gifts, and some are in essence evidence of a side-door participation in the global economy.

But lingering on this point is not where Che has spent the bulk of his efforts, which have been—I underscore again—considerable. Crisscrossing the continent, Che’s documentation of the African projects of North Korea’s Mansudae Art Studio has been an arduous exercise in archive building.

Archives seem impersonal, emotionless, but of course we know they are not. They bear the same paradoxes of documentary photography, the appearance of irrefutable fact, which nonetheless is authored by an institution, or in this case an individual, with a singular situation in regard to history, to power.

The archives Che laboriously collects from those held by North Korea, and those embodied in Africa, chart the far reaches of a cold war. But the breadth of this collection of images and documents can also be seen as an effort of understanding, of reconciliation of facts. Like all archives they require that we consider the system that governs it, in this case the drive and intention of Che himself. And what could drive him to go to these lengths, to uncover for us things that are not commonly seen, and never thoroughly assembled together, except an abiding trust in the fact that truths should be in the light, should be recorded.

Che has traveled many thousands of miles over the course of years to assemble these documents. What they evidence is the reality of activities initiated only miles from his home in Seoul, which he otherwise would not be allowed to know. More than a cold war, they document a civil war. It is this chasm that Che strives so arduously to fill. If the photos alone, then, are neutral, and in what they show, so often so lacking in complex facts as to carry meaning insufficient to full understanding, then what has Che achieved? It is the archive itself— steeped in a sort of inchoate longing, and this fever of gathering, of a drive to piece it together, in the end, perhaps inconclusively—where the project's affect is most powerful.

1. Okwui Enwezor, Archive Fever: The Use of the Document in Contemporary Art, (Göttingen: Steidl / ICP, 2008), 41.

2. Kevin Herten interview with John Dell’Osso, “African Statues and North Korean Sanctions,” May 21, 2021. The Take, Al Jazeera. Podcast Audio.