has often used drag in her artwork to explore gender roles, considering it a medium through which she can better understand the construction of her own position in society. On this topic Shimada has written, “putting on drag is not changing one’s identity completely. It is examining layers and complexities of one’s position." Bones in Tansu: Family Secrets (2004) In 2004, Shimada presented her interactive installation Bones in Tansu: Family Secrets as part of the exhibition “Borderline Cases” at A.R.T. in Ebisu, Tokyo, organized by the Feminist Art Action Brigade and curated by Kim Sunhat of the Mori Art Museum. The installation, in which she solicited the war memories of museum visitors and incorporated them into the exhibit, has also been exhibited in seven other international locations, including the Philippines, Thailand, Indonesia, Canada, and Denmark. This work allowed gallery visitors to enter a confession booth and privately write down their family secrets and submit them in a sealed box, which the artist could later select and display in a large tansu (traditional Japanese chest of drawers). Bones in Tansu: Family Secrets engaged with the way in which the memories of perpetrators and victims are repressed and forgotten as time goes by, forming an ‘ever-expanding’ dialogue that grew each time it was exhibited. Shimada has stated that this installation was her way of resisting the apathy of the younger generation, for whom the war history is being repressed by Japan’s older generations and the influence of Japanese nationalism and conservative historical revision of the Japanese education system. This work may have been inspired by Shimada's own discovery that her grandfather had been a policemen before the war and was one of many ordered to “dispose of dangerous criminals” in the Kantō Massacre mass murdering of an estimated 6,000 ethnic Korean residents of Japan that followed the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923. Becoming a Statue of a Japanese Comfort Woman (2012-Present) Since 2012, Shimada has been performing Becoming a Statue of a Japanese Comfort Woman (originally entitled Missing). In the first iteration of this performance, she donned a Japanese kimono, painted her skin bronze, and sat in front of the Japanese Embassy in London for approximately one hour, in a reference to the tribute to Statue of Peace, the commemorative tribute to the enslaved Korean ‘comfort women’ of the Asia-Pacific War. Shimada’s choice to dress in a kimono rather than a traditional