Mick Hartley

At last, a monument honoring Kim Jong Un, from the renowned Mansudae Art Studio:

The Workers’ Party’s Central Committee recently ordered the erection of a monument at Central Cadres Training School to honor North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s first lecture at the academy, Daily NK has learned. 

A Daily NK source in North Korea said Wednesday that the Workers’ Party’s Central Committee had ordered Mansudae Art Studio to build the monument at the Central Cadres Training School this year, “a deeply meaningful year concluding the first decade of the Supreme Leader’s first 10 years of revolutionary leadership.”

Mansudae Art Studio specialises in dictatorship kitsch, with statues of the preceding Kims  – Great Leader and Dear Leader – all over North Korea. Their most famous work outside North Korea is undoubtedly Senegal's African Renaissance Monument:

Though a statue of a muscle-bound Kim Jong-un is, to be fair, unlikely.

The placing of a monument to Kim Jong Un at the Workers’ Party’s leading training facility for cadres, alongside pre-existing monuments with the teachings of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il, aims to demonstrate that the youngest Kim has joined the ranks of his predecessors, while also bringing his first decade in power to a conclusion.

The source said the leadership is lending significance to the effort to produce and erect the monument, declaring that Kim’s commemorative address — which “creatively elaborated on the theory of Juche-based Revolutionary Party Building, the essence of the revolutionary ideology of the Kim Jong Un age” — was worth “engraving in splendid manner” as an event “worthy of attention in the Workers’ Party’s history.” 

The source said the leadership is telling Mansudae Art Studio that erecting the monument to the youngest Kim after erecting monuments with the handwriting of Kim Il Sung in 1948 and Kim Jong Il in 1998 is “highly significant.”

In short, it appears that the leadership is praising Kim’s commemorative address at the Central Cadres Training School as an important act in establishing a new revolutionary theory that opened an era in the history of the party, possibly as groundwork to make “Kimjongunism” an official doctrine in the future.

Meanwhile, students at provincial, city and country cadre schools nationwide have begun intensive studies of Kim’s lecture at the Central Cadres Training School, during which the North Korean leader stressed, “The cause of party building is precisely a revolutionary cause, and the level of party building can be called the level of revolutionary development.”