Artist Saimdang was selected to feature of the 50,000-won banknote to raise awareness of gender equality within Korea. However, this choice caused great controversy amongst many feminist commentators, who saw the selection as a way for the government to promote historic Confucian notions of gender identity and patriarchal expectations of women.
Murayama’s photographic series Kitanai Odori displays Murayama’s body in the throes of an ecstatic nude performance, demonstrating a visual embodiment of an emancipated self. Mavo artists challenged the Japanese government’s social matrix and programme of homogeneity, and for it the group suffered dearly.
The implementation of a Euroamerican binary in nineteenth century Japan fuelled an erasure of indigenous gender identities; the subsequent impact of centring biological sex had significant effect on contemporary Japanese society.
The construction of modern sexuality emphasises the sameness of biological gender between sexual object and sexual subject, which did not operate in Japan as it could not accommodate these existing gender constructions. The intense connection of the Nikkō Tōshōgu to the Tokugawa meant that it was intrinsically connected to a time that was becoming increasingly demonised as deviant.
