Visual Artist Miji Ih’s Research Trip into the History of the “Comfort Women” and Her Exhibition Project

It was the fall of 2020. Korea Verband, a civic organization based in Berlin, installed Ari, a Statue of Peace, in Moabit, a neighborhood in Berlin’s Mitte district. Ever since its unveiling, the statue has faced constant threats of removal, a process I witnessed firsthand as a Korean resident of the city. Ari was far more than a historical monument. Its threatened removal came to symbolize a convergence of pressing contemporary issues: racial discrimination, residency rights, hierarchies and divisions within the culture of memory, the resulting attempts at exclusion, and the structural marginalization of the women’s movement. Most striking of all was the solidarity shown by various migrant women’s organizations that rallied to defend the statue. What, I wondered, could bridge the experiences and memories of women who had arrived in Berlin from such different backgrounds? It was this very question that compelled me to keep a close watch on the campaign to protect Ari, while simultaneously resolving to dedicate myself to studying the history of the Japanese military “Comfort Women.”

Meeting Bae Bong-gi and Listening to the “Empty Space”

The more I reflected on the fact that, despite decades of activism, the issue of the Japanese military “Comfort Women” remains unresolved, and on the weight of its history and the movement itself, as well as the importance of standing in solidarity with the surviving victims, the more I felt that this was not a subject on which an individual could presume to voice a personal opinion. Despite the history learned in school and the memories encountered through popular media, the term “Comfort Women” remained at once familiar and unfamiliar—above all, a phrase to be approached with the utmost care. Gradually, I found myself wanting to confront the heavy sensation surrounding this term, sensing that within it, a connection to the lives of women today is inextricably linked. Centering the exhibition on the pivotal concept of “Comfort Women,” I wanted to trace the footsteps of these women and create a space where this continuity could be felt.

I began by building a foundation of knowledge through news articles and encyclopedic sources, then broadened the scope of my research by reading academic studies and following their references. At the same time, I read published life histories, nonfiction novels, and literature on military camptowns. Literature prompted me to reflect on the fact that women’s lives cannot be reduced to a single narrative but are defined by the uniqueness and diversity of each individual’s experience. I also gathered materials from the online archives of public institutions, including the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), the Seoul Metropolitan Archives, and Archive 814 of the Research Institute on Japanese Military Sexual Slavery (RIMSS). Whenever I visited Korea, I examined historical records exhibited in museums related to the subject. These archival materials ultimately became central to the project, serving both as resources for understanding how perspectives differ depending on who creates the record and as barometers of the prevailing perceptions of their time.

The first thing I encountered when I began this research was a newspaper column about Bae Bong-gi. At the center of Part I of this project, Münder (Mouths), and still the figure who continues to drive the project forward, Bae Bong-gi was a victim-survivor of the Japanese military “Comfort Women” system who was compelled to give testimony about her experiences in order to obtain special residency rights in Okinawa, Japan. Since then, I encountered a wide range of materials, including a book based on interviews with Bae Bong-gi,^[1] oral history records, newspaper articles, academic studies, films, and U.S. military documents on the Battle of Okinawa. As I read these sources, I found myself repeatedly struck by the fact that certain periods of Bae Bong-gi’s life had received little attention precisely because she was a victim of the “Comfort Women” system. The roughly ten years between leaving home and arriving in Okinawa after being deceived by a fraudulent job offer, as well as the nearly thirty years she spent in Okinawa after the war before she was able to prove that she had been a “Comfort Woman,” remained obscure. I came to feel that, in order to understand what had obscured those years and where that obscurity originated, I needed to visit the places where she had lived. I hoped that visiting those places myself would allow me to understand her life in more concrete terms.

However, what I encountered during the research trip was an unexpected sense of being at a loss. Because so much of what was known about the circumstances that she had faced remained speculative, the sense of not knowing only grew stronger. As the project evolved, I found myself increasingly visiting areas that had once hosted U.S. military bases, camptowns, and neighboring red-light districts—a trajectory I had never imagined at the outset.

Reflecting on Bae Bong-gi’s age when she arrived in Okinawa, I decided to include in the project a portrait of a woman around the age of thirty. Rather than attempting to represent her life in concrete detail, I tried to attend to what those places evoked in me as I stood where she might once have walked. Instead of imagining her as a tragic victim, I chose to think of her as someone who had made the decision to build a life there. I followed the paths these women may once have taken, imagining their simple desire to survive, the choices and journeys made in pursuit of that ordinary desire, and the consequences that followed. The photographs, videos, and sound recordings made during my research trips document these places as they exist today—places where someone once lived decades ago. Although these seemingly desolate landscapes evoke only a sense of forgetting, it was important for me to convey the absence they hold, because this project began with a desire to know someone I can no longer meet. Reminding myself that this project is not journalism, I set aside questions about the effectiveness of the images. Rather than prioritizing the communication of information, I focused instead on arranging it in ways that would leave questions behind—or make room for them.

The Three-Part Project Münder: Following the Threads of Women, the Body, Migration, and Labor

The three-part project Münder is a long-term project that traces the interconnected themes of women, the body, migration, and labor while questioning the absences left in places overlooked within collective memory. I wanted to create a space in which to remember social stigma and exclusion, the silence that has formed around them, and the enduring will of women to live despite adversity. By attending to the recurring realities of women’s lives across different times and places in the history of the military “Comfort Women,” I seek to discover the ordinary moments of women’s lives within what has been left behind.

Part 1 of the trilogy, Münder (2023–2024), is grounded in research on testimonial accounts documenting the life of a survivor of the Japanese military “Comfort Women” system in Okinawa who was unable to return home after the war. Part 2, And What Remained Thereafter (2025–2026), examines representations of the history of U.S. military “Comfort Women” in postwar literature, film, and other forms of popular media, while also conducting field research in camptowns near U.S. military bases in South Korea and Germany. Finally, Part 3, Münder Emerging from an Empty Space (working title, 2027–2028), will begin by investigating how the subjects of labor within the camptown economy surrounding U.S. military bases in South Korea have changed since the 1990s.

My solo exhibition Mangshitori, held in Seoul in December 2025 to introduce Parts 1 and 2 of the project, was part of my process of discovering and refining the questions that drive my practice. The exhibition title, Mangshitori,^[2] derives from the English word “monster.” It is a proper noun used by a woman who was born in Japan, raised in Korea, and later immigrated to the United States. Drawn from Grace M. Cho’s Tastes Like War, the term Mangshitori serves as a metaphor for Japanese military “Comfort Women” who could not find a place within the social norms and order of their time, while also encapsulating the conceptual premise of the Münder project: to challenge the historical othering of women. Remembering the women who were called Mangshitori—women who could not return to their families, hometowns, or homelands and instead had to build lives elsewhere—I found myself reflecting on what it means to practice hospitality today. My aim was to illuminate the lives of individual women while enabling viewers to sense the social structures and positions that shaped those lives.

Of the five women featured in the exhibition Mangshitori—Bae Bong-gi and Tomiyo from Red-Tile House, Gun-ja from Tastes Like War, and Seung-ja and Mi-ok from Ppaetbeol—four share experiences of poverty, hardship, and the military “Comfort Women” system in their early years. Yet each led a unique life. Through these five women, each with her own distinct character and shaped by different times and places, the exhibition seeks to see each woman as an individual rather than someone whose identity is subsumed under the label of “Comfort Women.” In creating a space for them, I found myself wondering whether the vitality of their lives and the diversity of the ways they lived had paradoxically been overlooked or forgotten because of the prevailing “ideal victim stereotype (imposed on women).” My approach was to make visible the recurring patterns that emerge across their lives. What conditions shaped their early lives? What kinds of labor did they perform? And what role did gender play in shaping their experiences? Rather than focusing on the moments when their lives seemed to go astray because of particular choices, I sought to understand what they might have felt at the moment of choosing, and the conditions that shaped those choices. This perspective became the guiding principle behind both the curatorial concept and the overall structure of Mangshitori.

The photographs can be broadly grouped into those made during research trips, studio still lifes, portraits, and works incorporating documentary materials. I generally avoided selecting images that felt visually sensational. For example, I chose not to use newspaper photographs that foregrounded Bae Bong-gi’s tears as a symbol of her suffering. Sound first appeared in Mal Mal 말 (2024), my first work to include spoken dialogue. It was followed by the dialogue-free works Walking Alongside While Imagining an Immeasurable Gap (2024), Home (2025), and Mugo’s Zip (2025). Throughout the project, text sometimes functions as a sketch of my thinking and at other times as a landscape reflecting the spirit of a particular era. Quotations drawn from a wide range of sources—including literature, oral histories, newspaper articles, documentary materials, Wikipedia, and blogs—were exhibited alongside my own fiction essays, working notes, and biographical texts. In Mangshitori, these materials were presented near the entrance under the title 8 Photographs and 38 Texts, together with documentary photographs printed as cyanotypes. I hoped that, as visitors encountered the images throughout the exhibition, they would recall the texts they had read at the beginning and begin imagining for themselves.

The exhibition Mangshitori was an attempt to create a space of open hospitality through the methodology of the “deconstructed film.” Rather than serving as evidence of historical fact, the photographic series Contours of the Mouth and Texas Everywhere were presented as mediating images that invite viewers to imagine women’s everyday lives by visualizing my inquiry into the recurring conditions of their lives. Within the exhibition, the 3D animation Two Females was the most symbolic and abstract work. Through it, I sought to visualize not only the life of Bae Bong-gi—the central figure of Part 1 of the project—as a migrant, but also her solidarity with the Okinawan people among whom she lived. The work imagines two female shisa,^[3] the guardian figures traditionally placed on Okinawan rooftops, gently biting one another to ward off misfortune and to protect the precious jewels held in each other’s mouths from evil. As the guardian of the exhibition, Two Females extends its network of meanings to encompass female solidarity and the possibility of moving beyond patriarchy. By dismantling the elements of time-based cinema within the exhibition space, I hoped that each visitor would create a hundred different stories, each beginning from their own experiences. At the same time, throughout the process of making the work and preparing the exhibition, I continually reflected on the (im)possibility of representation, striving above all to avoid any single, definitive representation. I hope that the Münder project, too, would remain as one among countless acts of remembering—not as a perfect representation, but as a question that emerges from the present.

And What Remained Thereafter

Confronting collective forgetting opened up a world of forgotten realities before me. Coming to know Bae Bong-gi through the history of the Japanese military “Comfort Women” led me to learn about the history of U.S. military “Comfort Women.” From there, my inquiry has continued to expand to the economies of military camptowns and the lived realities of transnational sex workers today. If Bae Bong-gi’s life is conveyed only in fragments, framed by images such as the “innocent girl” or the “daughter taken away,” or if she is remembered merely as one among the many lives overlooked in the context of Korea’s division, we stand to lose much of what her life can teach us. If we can listen to the words she left behind on their own terms, they may become a pathway to remembering other forgotten women.

After the exhibition Mangshitori, I stayed in Gwangju and visited former camptowns near U.S. military bases across Korea. As I traveled through these camptowns, I became increasingly aware of the collective forgetting surrounding the red-light districts that developed in their vicinity. Now back in Berlin, I am researching the impact that the U.S. military presence in Germany has had on the lives of German women. This summer, I plan to attend the Deutsche-Amerikanisches Volksfest (German-American Folk Festival)^[4] in what was formerly West Germany and conduct field research in the towns surrounding former U.S. military bases. Looking at the long history of military “Comfort Women” and the transnational silence surrounding daughters who were sold through the web of militarism and patriarchy, I hope to trace what these interconnected memories are telling us.