Girl Statue of One’s Own

Art History Public Seminar

Girl Statue of One’s Own: On Customizing a Public Memorial for “Comfort Women”

Date: 10 February 2026 (Tuesday)
Time: 6pm-7pm
Venue: Arts Tech Lab, 4/f, Run Run Shaw Tower, Centennial Campus, HKU
Format: in-person only, first come first served, walk-ins welcome

Speaker: SaeHim Park (Assistant Professor of Cultural Studies, Department of Cultural and Religious Studies, CUHK)

The Statue of Peace (2011), commonly known as the Girl Statue, is a public memorial dedicated to “comfort women,” an infamous euphemism referring to gender-based violence under the Japanese Empire from c.1931 to 1945. Drawing from an ongoing book manuscript, Girl Statue Rush: On Imaging Comfort Women, this talk examines how the statue’s circulation across scale, form, and media reshapes practices of remembrance in the historical present.

SaeHim Park is an art historian and Assistant Professor of Cultural Studies in the Department of Cultural and Religious Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. She works on contemporary feminist art and visual culture; memory and trauma; and the environmental humanities across the Asia-Pacific. Her writings have appeared or are forthcoming in Mortality, Art Inquiries, Journal of the Society for Asian Humanities, Capacious, and Feminist Formations. She received her PhD in Art, Art History and Visual Studies from Duke University, and previously taught as a tenure-track Assistant Professor of History at Xavier University of Louisiana.

Image: 작은 소녀상/Peace Statue/平和少女像, War & Women’s Human Rights Museum, Seoul.