FEATURE: Art exhibit 'interrupts' trauma of wartime sex slaves

MANILA, July 22 Kyodo

Art for art's sake is not the maxim of an international group of artists using their artworks to ''interrupt'' the trauma of Asian ''comfort women'' forced into sexual slavery at Japanese military camps during World War II.

Central to the theme of ''Trauma, Interrupted,'' a contemporary art exhibit at the Cultural Center of the Philippines in Manila by woman artists from six countries, including Japan, is the concept of art as a healing force in tackling the complex issues of trauma caused by sexual slavery and violence against women.

''We are not dredging up the past. We are coming to terms with a range of traumas to find healing,'' exhibition curator Flaudette May Datuin said.

She said most of the artworks deal with the ''historical trauma'' of women who had kept secret their painful experiences inflicted by the Imperial Japanese Army more than 60 years ago.

Works in the exhibition, the first mainstream project in Manila to cover the sensitive issue of comfort women, as sex slaves are euphemistically known in Japan, show the rage, shame, innocence, and bitterness of the victims, and also their common quest for justice.

''What can art do in the face of global suffering? Do we interrupt the trauma or do we hurt the situation in our attempts to help,'' asked Datuin, an art studies professor at the University of the Philippines.

The exhibition, which opened June 14 and runs until July 29, follows the pronouncement by Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in March that there was ''no evidence'' the Japanese military forced women in East Asia into sexual slavery.

Some historians estimate as many as 200,000 women from the Korean Peninsula, China, Taiwan, the Philippines, Indonesia and elsewhere were forced into sexual slavery during World War II.

Most of them lived in poverty and endured physical and emotional traumas after the war and have started to come forward since the early 1990s to reveal their pasts and demand reparations from Japan.

Datuin said the exhibition is also dedicated to the memory of 78-year-old Tomasa Salinog, a comfort woman from Antique Province, who died on April 6, a week after she wrote a petition letter to Abe asking for justice before she dies.

While many Filipino sex slaves accepted ''atonement money'' offered in 1995 by Japan's private Asian Women's Fund, which allocated hundreds of millions of yen for medical welfare projects to assist wartime sex slaves, Salinog refused to accept the money and demanded compensation directly from the Japanese government.

''Theirs might be a losing battle but they hope to win the war of hearts and minds. And that is what our exhibition wishes to contribute,'' Datuin said.

Two years after the project was launched, the artists came up with works that mirror their struggles and the collective pain and trauma of comfort women they have encountered in the Philippines and Asian countries.

Many of the artworks were installations, which require interaction and participation. But the collection is varied, ranging from performances and paintings to digital photography and video documentary.

American visual artist Terry Berkowitz's ''The Malaya Lola Project,'' named after a group of Filipino comfort women, gave face to the women of Mapanique village in central Luzon Island, where Japanese soldiers killed all the men they could find and raped the women in a garrison on Nov. 23, 1944.

Berkowitz photographed the former sex slaves, now in their late 70s and 80s, with smiling faces, some wearing their best dresses reserved for special occasions. Their close-up photos were hung side by side in a hallway as a chant was played in the background, voicing their hopes for justice.

''The comfort women despite their experiences wore dignified faces. They came out as empowered victims,'' Datuin said.

Tokyo-based performance artist Tari Ito rendered a dance-music performance in ''I Remember You,'' which she said is homage to South Korean Kim Sun Dok, who said she was raped by Japanese soldiers in a sex camp in Shanghai.

''Through this performance, I want to jointly struggle for justice. It is not history but current,'' Ito explained. ''This is also an objection against current climate in Japanese society. The nation-state seems like preparing for another war in spite of its war-renouncing Constitution.''

Another Japanese artist, painter Nobuko Watabiki, presented eight nearly abstract paintings rendered on Japanese paper about her personal struggles as a woman.

''I express my view on life to the point of exposing my inner self. By layering several of my own lived experiences, I came to fathom attitudes and philosophies of others,'' Watabiki said.

Her works are bright and happy on the surface but if you look at them closely, there is ''tension beneath the playfulness,'' Datuin said.

South Korean-born Yong Soon Min of the United States created ''Wearing History,'' an installation of hanging clothes that she wore to signify 75 years since the first comfort women station was established in Shanghai in 1932.