In 1985, women in gorilla masks gathered at New York's Museum of Modern Art to protest its lack of female artists. Known as the Guerrilla Girls, the group continues to raise awareness about inequality in the art world. Thirty years later, their spirit has ignited some women in Japan to action.
Donning pink rabbit masks and adopting the names of women and sexual minorities who fought for their own rights after World War II (from the creative world and beyond) as their aliases, Ashita Shojo Tai (Tomorrow Girls Troop) employs Guerrilla Girls' methods to tackle gender inequality in Japan. Established in 2015, the "fourth wave feminist social art collective" aims to promote a society in which everyone can express themselves freely.
"When I went to graduate school in New York to study art, I was surprised to find that feminist art was so established as a field that you couldn't participate in any art discussion unless you understood feminism," Midori Ozaki (named after the novelist who lived from 1896 to 1971), the founder of the group tells me. "In Japan, unless you major in gender studies at university, you never have an opportunity to study feminism."
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