The survivors themselves.

Every Wednesday since January 1992, survivors and advocates gathered outside the Japanese Embassy in Seoul demanding acknowledgement, apology, and reparations. These became known as the Wednesday Demonstrations - the world's longest-running protest for women's rights.

As the 1,000th demonstration approached in December 2011, survivors decided they wanted something permanent. Not a monument built for them by well-meaning outsiders, but a memorial they would create with artists who would listen.

They chose sculptors Kim Seo-kyung and Kim Eun-sung, then worked with them for months. Survivors described their memories: the shoes taken away, the hair cut short, the bare feet on cold floors, the bird they imagined when they looked out barred windows. They insisted on the empty chair - because some didn't survive, and because solidarity means sitting beside someone, not just observing from a distance.

The artists didn't impose a vision. They listened, sketched, revised, listened again. The statue that emerged on 14 December 2011 wasn't a artistic interpretation of suffering - it was survivors' own testimony, rendered in bronze.

That's why these statues matter. They're not about survivors. They're by survivors. Every replica that's been installed globally - including Auckland's - carries that collaborative creation, that insistence on agency, that refusal to be passively memorialised.

When you sit in that empty chair, you're not just remembering. You're accepting an invitation the survivors themselves extended.