Japanese artist Megumi Igarashi, aka "Rokudenashiko," is no stranger to artistic controversy.
The feminist artist-gone-activist was arrested by Tokyo police in July of 2014 for displaying artwork derived from "obscene" 3D-printed scans of her own vulva.
Today her story has drawn focus on the struggle for female equality and body-positivity, and not just in Japan.
She has created numerous art pieces including life-sized sculptures, cute cartoon characters and even a fully functional, crowd-funded kayak using the 3D-printed dioramas of her vagina.
Japan has notorious laws against the displaying of male and female genitalia, even in the adult film industry where all genitalia is heavily censored by mosaic pixels.
When Igarashi began she was not trying to make any kind of political statement with her art.
However the backlash she received only motivated her to continue pushing the boundaries.
She soon became a high profile case as the news of her arrest spread around the world like wildfire.
Though she rallied the support of fans as well as various international women's rights organizations, she was eventually charged with distributing indecent material and was fined 400,000 yen. (About 3,400 USD) by the Tokyo District Court in 2016.
She admits the outcome could have been much worse, but Igarashi is rightfully unsatisfied with the Japanese government's stance on her artwork.
Defiant to the end, she refused to back down.
She continues to advocate for women's rights in Japan, using her art to spread her message from her official website, social media, and art galleries around the world.
In 2016 she produced a fully illustrated manga (Japanese comic) called "What is Obscenity? The Story of a Good For Nothing Artist and her Pussy" which has now been translated into several languages.
She also married Scottish musician Mike Scott in 2016, and one year later they welcomed their first child into the world.
Igarashi now resides in Dublin with her young son and rock star husband, the lead vocalist and guitarist for The Waterboys, a British-Irish folk-rock band.
Megumi Igarashi remains a creative tour de force, pioneering towards her goals of destigmatizing the public perception of the vagina and ending the systemic discrimination against women's bodies.
I do not own the images shown in this blog post, all rights are reserved by their respective owners.
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