“An exhibition opened Wednesday in Tokyo of paintings by former ‘comfort women,’ depicting the pain they suffered as sex slaves for the Imperial Japanese Army. A woman looks at paintings by former ‘comfort women’ depicting their experiences in Tokyo’s Shinjuku Ward. The 24 works, on display at the Women’s Active Museum on War and Peace in Shinjuku Ward, were done by former sex slaves who live at Nanum House, which means shared house in Korean, near Seoul. They studied painting under volunteer teachers. ‘Innocence Stolen’ depicts a naked girl lying beside a Japanese soldier with her hands covering her face. It is from the painter’s memory of being forcibly brought to a mountain by a Imperial Japanese soldier and raped. The painting ‘Comfort Station in Rabaul’ shows a comfort woman looking tired as she sits in front of a brothel in Papua New Guinea while Imperial Japanese soldiers wait in line to go inside. Historians estimate Japan forced up to 200,000 women, from the Korean Peninsula, China, Taiwan, the Philippines and other parts of Asia were forced into sexual slavery.” — Japan Times (Japan)

Here’s a little picture of the exhibit. Some of the same works can be found here and also here. This latter site also has a fascinating selection of historical photographs of sex slaves and their comfort stations. Somehow the comfort stations are reminiscent of the squalid red-light districts featured in photographer Hans Neleman’s recent book Night Chicas, which takes a disturbingly intimate look at prostitution in Guatemala. Evidently the architecture of brothels is as universal as the market for hookers.

All that being said, what’s a person to make of this “art” by comfort women? No doubt it serves as an important document and reminder of the practice. However, you can only call it “art” by putting it in quotation marks. It’s art not in any museum sense, like Titian and Manet, but rather “art” in the psychological sense, like the sort of drawings that shrinks have children do to exemplify their abuse. The painting Memory of the Sea, by Tomiyama Taeko, has a certain Bosch-like power to it. (All those skulls…) Kang Duk Kyung’s Plundered Soul suggests a Japanese Frida Kahlo. (And look closely at the bottom: more skulls.) But works like this are the exception and not the rule, since most of them are on the level of a high-school art class.

All of which goes to confirm a rule of thumb in matters aesthetic: though great artists may have often had lives full of pain, pain itself does not make anyone into a great artist.

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