Thriller: TikTok finds the Michael Jackson statue in JoCo arboretum, fans excited
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- A TikTok user visited the Michael Jackson bronze statue on June 25.
- The bronze statue has stood beside a walking trail in the arboretum since 2011.
- The TikTok post drew over 400 comments and prompted local fans to visit and photograph.
Last month a TikTok user from Minnesota made a pilgrimage to the Overland Park Arboretum & Botanical Gardens in southern Johnson County. She visited on June 25, the 17th anniversary of Michael Jackson’s death.
She went there to visit the bronze statue of Jackson in the arboretum’s International Sculpture Garden, an art piece that has stood in a pretty, leafy spot next to a walking trail since 2011.
“If you’re in the area I’d recommend,” she wrote.
More than 400 people commented on the video, many expressing the surprise in this one: “Never knew!!!”
Someone from the Kansas City area wrote: “How have I lived here for 16 years and I didn’t know we had a Michael Jackson sculpture.”
Within hours of that post, two fans went to the statue wearing Michael Jackson T-shirts and photographed themselves with it.
“I grew up in Overland Park and I only recently found out that we had that statue there when I was taking a walk through the sculpture garden,” Julie Freijat-Babel, the arboretum’s marketing communications specialist, told The Star.
“It’s definitely not something that I think is super common knowledge around the city. But it’s definitely cool, especially now with the biopic, to see people realizing that it’s there and they can go see it.”
This week the Jackson biopic, “Michael,” starring Jackson’s nephew in the lead role, became the first biopic in history to make more than $1 billion. It is now the highest-grossing music biopic of all time, surpassing Freddie Mercury’s story, 2018’s “Bohemian Rhapsody.”
Jackson’s birthday is coming up on Aug. 29, a day that, in the past, has drawn visitors to the statue. Sometimes, they leave flowers at his feet and in his hands.
The statue is rare. Though there are monuments and memorials — sidewalk plaques, benches, murals — sprinkled around the globe, there appear to be very few Jackson statues permanently displayed in the United States. A 10-foot statue has made occasional appearances in the main lobby of the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino in Las Vegas.
Most statues of his likeness appear to be in China where he was, and still is, beloved.
And there begins the answer to the question: Why is there a statue of Michael Jackson in Kansas?
It began with Overland Park artist Kwan Wu, born in China and recognized as one of the top sculptors in the world. Since relocating to the United States in the late 1980s Wu has created several recognizable pieces of public art across the metro.
He created the life-size sculpture of George Brett at Kauffman Stadium, the life-size bronze baseball players at the National Negro League Baseball Museum, the bronze monument to the Bill of Rights in Ilus Davis Park, a statue of the father of basketball Phog Allen at the University of Kansas, and the Children of the Trails memorial in the Johnson County Courthouse Square in Olathe.
In 2011, Wu — who became a U.S. citizen in 1997 — helped organize the sculpture garden at the arboretum “to promote cultural exchange between China and the United States through sculpture,” Wu told the Star via email.
“At that time, a group of Michael Jackson music fans in Guangzhou and Hong Kong happened to have a celebration event, and they took the initiative to launch a donation campaign to make a bronze statue of Michael Jeckson and donate it to the ... sculpture park to express their love for Michael Jackson’s music and appreciation for the cultural exchange between China and the United States.”
Dedicated in November 2011, the statue was created by renowned Chinese sculptor Lu Zengkang, director of China’s prestigious Guangzhou Sculpture Academy.
The statue’s pose is reminiscent of Jackson in a couple of his music videos, “Dirty Diana” and “Black or White.” His arms are outstretched and his shirt, worn like a jacket over a T-shirt, billows behind him as if blown by an invisible wind.
Wu was “delighted” to accept the statue for the park “and since then, Michael Jackson’s sculpture has become a permanent collection of the China U.S. sculpture park, and his music is forever appreciated by people around the world,” he said.
There are currently 22 sculptures in the International Sculpture Garden, said Freijat-Babel, including another piece by Lu Zengkang, and Wu. They sit along a nearly half-mile loop of walking trails.
The Jackson sculpture is a short stroll, about 10 minutes, from the arboretum’s Environmental Education Visitor Center. “It’s the first trail that you kind of encounter before you get to some of the longer, winding trails,” she said.
The arboretum doesn’t track visitors to that particular sculpture. But social media has clearly found it.
On a TikTok posted in May commenters wrote “visit every month” and “I visited him last year.”
But some skeptical fans wonder, when they hear about a statue of Michael Jackson standing in the Kansas woods, whether it’s true or if people just want to be startin’ somethin’.
The 300-acre arboretum is at 8909 W. 179th St. Admission is $7 for ages 18 and older.
“I can’t tell if you’re making this up or not like when they post beach pics and say it’s Olathe Lake,” one fan wrote on that TikTok posted in May.
This story was originally published July 17, 2026 at 12:04 PM.
.jpg)