In Cut Piece—one of Yoko Ono’s early performance works—the artist sat alone on a stage, dressed in her best suit, with a pair of scissors in front of her. The audience had been instructed that they could take turns approaching her and use the scissors to cut off a small piece of her clothing, which was theirs to keep. Some people approached hesitantly, cutting a small square of fabric from her sleeve or the hem of her skirt.
SEALDs, short for Students Emergency Action for Liberal Democracy (自由と民主主義のための学生緊急行動, Jiyū to minshu shugi no tame no gakusei kinkyū kōdō), was a student activist organisation in Japan that organised protests against the ruling coalition headed by Prime Minister Shinzō Abe in 2015 and 2016. Its focus was on the security-related bills enacted in 2015 that allow the Japanese Self-Defense Force to be deployed overseas.