Public Transport Painting

a comic take on a public service poster I saw on a Japanese train. The original poster had a cartoon Japanese girl, feet apart and turned in, knees together, in pig tails and a uniform, crying, while a cartoon Japanese boy took a picture up her skirt with his cartoon cellphone. There was a big red X over the image... to remind the general public that this situation was not ok. “Don’t take pictures up girls skirts please, thank you very much”. It was such a cute or ‘kawaii’ Japanese way of saying No!, so specific to the culture but with a message of subjugation and separation that is global. The appropriation of female sexual identity by males in society is not specific to japan but with a culture heavily influenced by Confucianism and the mascu-linear principles of ‘ai’ having been in play for centuries, male ownership of women is just beginning to stop being a normative, but the prevalence of ‘dominance imagery’ in manga and the more fetishistic habits are widespread. The image that inspired this work itself informed the viewer of the girls helplessness and victimhood in the situation as the leading argument against what is clearly a violation of basic human rights. I’ve subverted that and the middle finger is the use of the body to defend the body non violently but is not the only point of power. After you see the finger and realise what it’s in front of the real point of power is in the display of ownership, the choice to display, what is usually seen as a point of vulnerability. The birds in the image are a nod to the princess/heroine in traditional western cartoon narrative being so sweet and unassuming as to not even scare away animals and so natural as to be aided by nature herself. They’re also a pair of great tits, a very territorial European small bird commonly found in hedgerows.