An image of a bulging-eyed, grinning bust of Kim Jong Un being unveiled at a ceremony, while the North Korean leader looks on with a grimace, has been racing around social media this week, along with claims that the unlucky sculptor would pay for it. People want to know one thing: is the Kim Jong Un statue real?
It is not. The image was made with artificial intelligence. But North Korea really has unveiled a statue of Kim this year, and the real one tells a far more interesting story.
The fake: an AI caricature
The viral picture shows a bust with oversized eyes and a strange, stretched smile, draped and revealed in what looks like an official ceremony. Posts sharing it suggested the artist faced punishment under the regime’s strict control of the leader’s image, and invited people to imagine making such a “tribute” themselves. Versions of the story have added embellishments, from an inflated price tag to a sculptor being executed.
None of it holds up. No independent source has reported any such ceremony or any such sculpture. The Brazilian fact-checking site Boatos.org ran the image through Google’s SynthID detector, which found a watermark identifying it as synthetic, AI-generated content. The bust also looks nothing like official North Korean portraiture, which is tightly controlled and relentlessly flattering.
The real statue, unveiled in March
What makes the fake so believable is that, for the first time, a real one exists. In late February, North Korean state television broadcast images of a sculpture of Kim Jong Un shown at an exhibition in Pyongyang. It is a half-length figure of a smiling Kim, his right hand tucked into his coat pocket.
South Korea’s Unification Ministry said in early March that, as far as it knew, this was the first sculpture of the current leader it had identified. Lim Eul-chul of Kyungnam University’s Institute for Far Eastern Studies described it as highly unusual, because North Korea has traditionally reserved statues for its dead leaders. He suggested the relaxed pose was meant to present Kim as approachable and devoted to the people rather than god-like.
How North Korea makes its leaders in bronze
North Korea is home to some of the largest leader statues anywhere. The best known is the Mansudae Grand Monument in Pyongyang, where colossal bronze figures of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il stand side by side, more than 20 metres tall, and where visitors are expected to bow and lay flowers. Statues and mosaics of the two men appear across the country.
Nearly all of this work comes out of the Mansudae Art Studio, the vast state workshop in Pyongyang that employs thousands of artists and has also exported monumental sculpture abroad, particularly to African countries. Its style is fixed: idealised faces, heroic scale, and absolute fidelity to the approved image.
Until this year, Kim Jong Un had avoided that treatment himself. The only known bust of him had been a gift from China’s Xi Jinping during a visit to Pyongyang in 2019. The new statue, modest in size and informal in pose, suggests the leader’s image is entering a new phase, and that the personality cult around him is growing.
Why the fake spread
The AI image works as a joke because it plays on a real fear: in North Korea, getting the leader’s likeness wrong is unthinkable. It also arrives in a year when the idea of a Kim Jong Un statue is genuinely new. That combination, a believable premise and an absurd picture, is exactly what fact-checkers say makes AI fakes travel.
The real statue has never been shown abroad, and no clear, close-up official photograph of it has been widely released. That gap is part of what allowed a cartoon to fill it.