Comfort women in the arts

Comfort women – girls and women forced into sexual slavery for the Imperial Japanese Army – experienced trauma during and following their enslavement. Comfort stations were initially established in 1932 within Shanghai, however silence from the governments of South Korea and Japan suppressed comfort women's voices post-liberation. Catalysed by the feminist-led Redress movement of the 1990s, the cause of comfort women has since been better publicised – in part due to the role of the visual arts in promoting healing and the creation of activist communities.