the Artist as LISA LEE

2014
Linocut
9×12

I have learned that not only the girls were lured to the comfort camp, but in some cases they were also taken by force from their household. Because not all the girls were gullible enough to fall for the army’s deceptive job offers, and there are some mothers who refused to send their daughters away to certain doom. One can only imagine the pain of the mothers when their child dies, but how much more the pain when they think of the horrors and humiliation their daughters would be forced into; it is a fate worse than death. This image is reminiscent of Kathe Kollwitz’s “a Death and the Mother” prints which shows a woman in a desperate struggle with a dark apparition that is trying to take the life of her young child, though, inevitably, she would lose the battle.