Since the 1990s, Yoshiko Shimada has explored cultural memory and the role of women as both aggressors and victims in the Asia-Pacific War (1941-1945), through printmaking, installation, video, performance, research and archiving. In the late 1990s, she collaborated with BuBu de la Madeleine for the two-person exhibition Made in Occupied Japan (1998), incorporating performance and drag into her practice for the first time. In 2012, she performed Being a Statue of a Japanese Comfort Woman in Japan, London, Seoul and Los Angeles.
After Japan fell into a strong anti-feminist backlash in the 2000s, Shimada was largely prevented from showing her work. As a result, she began researching the art and politics of the 1960s and 1970s, a period that paved the way for the third and fourth waves of feminism. Shimada’s most recent work has focused on the feminist political group Ch/piren, a militant organisation that emerged in the 1970s and incorporated street theatre into its activism. With their distinctive pink helmets, these activists, led by Misako Enoki, fought for access to contraception and sexual and reproductive health: their advocacy still resonates with the current struggle for women’s bodily autonomy. To this day, it remains the only feminist movement in Japan to mount a national election campaign.
—Johann Fleuri
