Lee Ok-sun, born into a poor family in 1920s Korea, was sold off to work, then abducted at around fourteen and transported to a military-run brothel in Japanese-occupied China, where she was held and raped by soldiers for years. After liberation she could not return home for decades and remained in China, her life permanently shaped by the captivity.
In Lee Ok-sun's case, extreme family poverty made her disposable: she was handed over to others under the promise of work and schooling long before the military took her. The economic vulnerability of a girl child created the opening that abduction then exploited.
The term 'comfort woman' recasts organized abduction and mass rape as a service, hiding coercion behind a soft word. Naming a crime in gentle institutional language shields perpetrators and obscures the victims' experience of what was done to them.
Rendering trauma through sparse, wordless ink landscapes (grass, empty fields, blank gaps) conveys what testimony cannot verbalize, letting silence and negative space carry the weight of violence. The viewer registers horror precisely in what is withheld rather than depicted.