The Redesign - The Visual Draft and Rhetorical Reasoning.

     Our redesign, titled "We Will Never Forget Our Daughters, Mothers, and Sisters-Nor Their Silence," departs from the traditional and static commemorative forms and instead embraces interactivity, oral history, public engagement, and formation of a space for broader discourse. Inspired by the limitations of traditional Comfort Women statues—which often localize trauma or flatten it into a certain silence—we wanted to amplify the survivors' voices directly to a broader public.

 To begin with, we will install thirteen chairs around the statues of peace. The twelve chairs symbolize the regional spread and diversity of victims, decentering Korea alone and honoring others often left out of the narrative, such as women from Taiwan, Vietnam, the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, East Timor, the Netherlands, and even Japan. An additional chair will be dedicated to the women whose suffering is unrecorded or erased, but not forgotten.

 Next, our use of sound foregrounds testimony as a mode of resistance. Visitors must engage physically to activate each chair's access to a screen and listening device, which plays translated excerpts from real testimonies (sourced from UN records and survivor interviews). This choice evokes Fleckenstein's claim that "we are constructed by the images we produce". In addition, once, the psychiatrist Bakshi mentioned that new exposure enables people to build different neuro pathways and different modes of behavior, which, in this case, we expect the act of listening to construct a certain relationship between the visitor and history, and eventually, behavior patterns with more empathy and sympathy for a better future.

 Following this, the participatory message wall and ability to purchase clothing (the funds from which will be donated to organizations focused on combatting human trafficking such as the Polaris Project, Anti-Trafficking International, Coalition against Trafficking in Women) reflects the idea of vernacular expression, allowing visitors to leave offerings, notes, and personal and collective reflections. First, the adoption of such an evolving and participatory layer of the monument resists closure, aligning with the idea that memory is an ongoing process, not a completed or static event. Second, it invites impacted communities and younger generations to be a bigger part of the historical reckoning. O'Brien and Sanchez, in their work, stress the importance of combatting revisionism and historical erasure through memorialization - from the possible future of the younger generations' increased engagement, we hope for the transmission of the comfort women survivor activists' core idea from the direct victims' fight and movement to that of the entirety of humanity, as human beings. To be more specific, the message includes a request for recognition of historical truth and acknowledgement, the importance of memory and its education, preventing the repeated war crimes, and restoring the dignity of human rights. Moreover, we aimed to deliberately blur the lines between monument and archive by embedding QR codes that lead to survivor interviews, educational resources, and legal records. By shedding light upon a difficult topic and encouraging participation with that history, we hope to combat erasure and revisionism—particularly the persistent denial of the Japanese government and far-right Japanese or even people from different cultures—embedding the record of memory into the monument itself.

 Ultimately, this redesign hopes to foreground power and memory as contested terrains. It refuses a single narrative. Different publics—Korean diaspora, Japanese tourists, feminists, war historians—will perhaps interpret this site through their own ideological lenses. Some may see healing; others, confrontation. That is intentional. We wanted to build a monument that does not just speak to the visitor, but almost seems to listen back.

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