Everyone knows about the Statue of Liberty, the Easter Island Moai heads, Mount Rushmore and the Sphinxes of Ancient Egypt, but not all monstrous monuments were built in centuries past. Colossal statues of even larger proportions are still built all over the world in modern times, from the many massive Buddhas of Asia to mythological creatures like merlions and shapeshifting horses. Though some of them are among the world’s tallest statues, these 7 are relatively lesser known, built between 1994 and 2017. (Of course, the former Soviet Union boasts so many oversized monuments, they’re in a category of their own.)

Mao Zedong’s Head, Changsha, China

The massive head of young Chinese dictator Mao Zedong gazes down at the city of Changsha, seemingly bursting from the rock in a grassy park. Built in 2007 by the Hunan People’s Government, it strays from the usual balding representations of Mao’s look later in life. It’s 105 feet tall and made of 8,000 pieces of granite, and here’s the kicker: it cost $300 million. Another giant statue of Chairman Mao, known as ‘Mega Mao,’ was built in Henan province in 2016 ridiculed so much for its excess that it was torn down soon after it went viral on the internet.

The Man Meets the Sea, Denmark

Four stark white figures stand 30 feet tall while seated, standing out when the sky is blue and virtually disappearing in cloudy weather. The ‘Man Meets the Sea’ sculpture is visible to ships arriving in or departing from Esbjerg Harbor on the southwest coast of Denmark. Created by Svend Wiig Hansen in celebration of the town of Esbjerg’s 100th anniversary as an independent municipality in 1994, the sculpture “portrays the meeting between pure, unspoilt mankind and nature. Man, innocent as from his mother’s womb. Man before rising up and beginning to act. That, according to Wiig Hansen, was where things started to go wrong – when man got ‘dirt’ on his hands.”

The Kelpies at Helix Park, Scotland

A pair of horse heads known as The Kelpies by sculptor Andy Scott emerged near the River Carron in the Falkirk Council Area of Scotland in October 2013 to celebrate a new extension of the Forth and Clyde Canal at Helix Park. Named for mythological Scottish shapeshifter that transform from horses into hooded humans, the statues pay tribute to the many horses that have helped Scotland become what it is today. Scott first created 9-foot-high versions in his studio, which were scanned by lasers and reproduced by steel fabricators. He envisions them as “water-borne, towering gateways into The Helix, the Forth and Clyde Canal and Scotland, translating the legacy of the area into proud equine guardians.”

Guan Yu God of War, Jingzhou, China

Quite stunning both for its proportions and its artistic merit, this enormous depiction of the Chinese god of war looks like he could start swinging his ‘Green Dragon Crescent Blade’ around at any second. Unveiled in 2017 in his namesake park in Jingshou, China, Guan Yu stands 190 feet tall, weighs over 1,320 tons and consists of over 4,000 bronze strips. He stands atop an 86,111-square-foot museum. Though he’s now been deified, Guan Yu was a real person, a general serving under warlord Liu Bei in the late Eastern Han dynasty. Known as a great warrior, he governed the Jing Province for seven years before he was captured and executed by a power-seeking betrayer in 220 C.E. His real-life exploits are rather overshadowed by myths that have sprung up around him, depicting him as the ultimate human embodiment of strength, loyalty and righteousness.

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The Modern Colossal 7 Lesser Known Monumental Wonders Of The World

The Russian embassy has taken a hard line in Bulgaria where Soviet monuments have been spray-painted to become iconic American fictional characters from Superman and the Joker to Santa Claus and Ronald McDonald.

According to the Moscow Times, Russia has continued to demand that measures be stepped up to clean and protect the statues. They also want Bulgarian authorities to identify and punish the criminals and do more to prevent future attacks.

The monument at the center of the controversy was sprayed with red paint around the anniversary of the Bulgarian Socialist Party, but some artists have had other ideas over the years as well.

Previously, this same monument in Sofia was painted bright pink to recall the Prague Spring — it later got covered in Ukrainian colors to show solidarity. They have been covered with masks as well.

Of course, this is all a bit excessive in context — these are memorials to a defunct regime and situated in a foreign country over which Russia has no control. One solution would be to simply remove them from public view, as has happened in other countries over the years, but, in the end, it’s up to Bulgaria, not Russia.

Visitors to Battery Park in Manhattan will find memorials to fallen soldiers, sunken sailors and 400 passengers who perished when a Staten Island ferry was attacked by a giant octopus.

This last event, however convincing (thanks to 250-pound cast-bronze sculpture and plaque), is entirely fictional, part of surprisingly elaborate hoax. That would be hard to guess at a glance, though, given the thought and craft that went into this fake memorial and the other materials that were designed to bolster its credibility.

Artist Joseph Reginella invented the scenario, crafting a website, a mock documentary, news articles and fliers to complete the deception. The monument even directs people to the Ferry Disaster Memorial museum. It also weaves in real-world facts, like the name of the ship.

He had the idea while taking the ferry himself. When his won asked whether there were dangerous creatures waiting below, he invented the story, then spent months elaborating on the fabrication.

To keep the city from taking it away, he has moved the memorial from place to place. To add credibility, he made the day of the event the same as the assassination of President Kennedy, something that would plausibly overshadow such a massive historic disaster.

Photographer Oliver Curtis turns his back on some of the world’s most famous monuments, capturing a wholly unexpected side to these familiar cultural icons.

If life is a journey and not a destination (to quote Ralph Waldo Emerson), then the ideal photographer to document the trip would be Oliver Curtis. In his Royal Geographical Society exhibition aptly titled “Volte-face”, Curtis visits the world’s most famous monuments and evocative locations… and then turns 180-degrees, snapping the polar opposite of what visitors have come from across the globe to see! The results are often enlightening in their own right, as the above views from the Chairman Mao Memorial Hall in Beijing, China’s Tiananmen Square and the Great Wall of China at Mutianyu illustrate.

American Dreaming

Curtis’ odd odyssey unfolded over a period of four years and involved a staggering amount of travel – one would hope he’d enrolled in a frequent flyer program beforehand. From start to finish, however, Curtis never lost sight of his mission “to send our gaze elsewhere and to favor the incidental over the monumental.” The photo above, taken at the White House on a perfect summer’s day, epitomizes his curious yet enlightening vision quest.

Let My People Golf

Curtis was inspired to record “counter-views” of the world’s most-photographed places in 2012, while visiting the Pyramids of Giza. Finding an ideal spot to capture the Great Pyramid of Khufu – the largest of the three main pyramids – Curtis glanced back in the direction from which he had came… and one might say he never looked back, er, sort of. “Immediately in front of me and under my feet,” explains Curtis, “the sand of the desert was adorned with an assortment of human detritus; litter, pieces of rusted metal, a large rubber washer and a torn hessian sack. Then, in the mid-distance I saw a newly constructed golf course, its fairways an intense green under the late morning sun.”

Acropolis Now

“I found this visual sandwich of contrasting colour, texture and form intriguing not simply for the photograph it made but also because of the oddness of my position;” adds Curtis, “standing at one of the great wonders of the world facing the ‘wrong’ way.” Though the locations may differ (that’s the Parthenon in Athens, Greece, above), Curtis’ photographic subjects evoke certain similarities due to they’re being cheek-by-jowl to greatness. Take the white stone bench in the image above: if you didn’t know it shared real estate with one of the world’s most iconic structures, it would seem perfectly at home in most any suburban garden.

Kodak Moment

In a world too-often suffused with the profane, these photographs provide a refreshing atmosphere of the mundane by being the antitheses of the associated famous construction. This works on a number of levels: no doubt Lenin would spin in his tomb if he knew a Kodak kiosk was conducting capitalism just outside!

The Rio Thing

Far from being overshadowed or perhaps because of it, these images display a subtle narrative all their own. Indeed, these reverse-views spotlight actual locales where workers and random folks display a palpable lack of awe; the consequence of daily exposure (or over-exposure, more likely) to what the rest of the world has put on a pedestal. Speaking of which, the trio above appear oblivious to Rio de Janeiro’s enormous Christ the Redeemer statue looming over them.

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Turn On Backwards Glances From Famous Monuments

Fenced off or set back from streets and sidewalks and often raised on platforms as well, civic monuments are oddly ideal candidates for concealing a peculiar secondary function: the ventilation of subterranean spaces, from sewage systems to subway tunnels.

In Sydney, Australia, the Hyde Park Obelisk was built precisely for this purpose back in 1857. Modeled on Cleopatra’s Needle located on the banks of London’s River Thames, the 60-foot-tall tower was designed to allow noxious gases to escape upward from the sewers below. Today, the monument remains in place, but vents the city’s somewhat-less-smelly stormwater system instead.

Meanwhile, in Nuremberg, Germany, a controversial set of statues depicting the trials of married life was commissioned specifically to disguise the subway exhaust port located on the site.

The Ehekarussell (roughly translated: marriage-go-round) is critiqued not because of noxious fumes, but for featuring a sequence of scenes through its statuary: a young happy couple turning older and angrier before one spouse slays the other.

Another approach that appears in many cities is more architectural, though no less monumental, using anything from small fake shell houses to huge multistory buildings as giant exhaust conduits.

In Burnaby, British Columbia, a boxy little house serves both to vent subway fumes but also acts as a mid-tunnel escape route for emergencies. Many of these structures not only act as exhaust pipes, but also contain bacterium-based odour removal plants so as to spew somewhat less obnoxious gasses.

The Callahan Tunnel ventilation building in Boston is a relatively less-camouflaged and more-imposing affair built of bricks with vents where one would ordinarily expect to see windows. Many other American cities have similarly larger exhaust buildings, including New York City, where they vent infrastructure including the Holland Tunnel.