Yoshiko Shimada

Only a few passers-by would have noticed the small female figure sitting still with her mouth taped, next to an empty chair, at the entrance to the Japanese Embassy in London in 2012. Camouflaged as a bronze statue, Yoshiko Shimada sat there for an hour dressed in a kimono, a guerrilla performance she would go on to repeat at several locations around Japan and abroad. By becoming a statue, Shimada was allowing a distant, unrelated history to become embodied again and thus more personal, and was making a direct protest against the Japanese government’s request to take down the bronze monument erected a year earlier in front of the Japanese Embassy in Seoul, Korea, commemorating the so-called “comfort women”—some 200,000 women, mainly from Korea and China, who were coerced into sexual slavery, providing sex for Japanese troops in military brothels across Asia during World War II.

These silent, durational interventions, which Shimada continues to perform today, are an impactful act of resilience to the unbiased prerogative of time, hijacked and made selective by those in power: the ability to blur, disembody, alienate, and erase. Since the 1990s, the artist has critically tackled the issue of Japanese female roles during the war from a feminist perspective and has consistently attempted to make the history of the “comfort women” of transnational importance. Her efforts to recuperate it from serving solely national political agendas focus on bringing to light the fact that some “comfort women” were Japanese, something the government and Japanese society prefer to ignore. As Shimada says, this only proves the depth of the social taboo and the stigmatization of women victims of sexual abuse.