The Lolita Complex: - Scholarly Commons Home

in May 2007. That event became my foray into the academic arena,
establishing my name in connection to the topic of the Japanese Lolita, as it
became the catalyst for the exhibition I curated at Auckland War Memorial
Museum, titled Loli-Pop, which ran from September to November, 2007.
By 2007, the Lolita subculture had finally began to make small waves in
terms of media awareness, with newspaper articles appearing worldwide.
However, mainstream society outside Japan was still waiting to catch on.
The question remains whether it ever really has in any significant way.
Besides known communities in some of the US states, and pockets of
Europe, such as Germany and France, the subculture has never really
operated on the same scale in many countries as it has in Japan. In a sense,
this has been a positive thing as it means that the minority groups around
the world have tended to adhere to the authentic Japanese proclivities,
deviating little from the movement’s intentions.
In New Zealand, it was the Loli-Pop exhibition that began public
discourse. It came about when Bevan Chuang, who was employed at
Auckland Museum in an administrative position, was planning to propose a
show on a contemporary, Asian theme to coincide with and promote the
opening of a new permanent gallery display titled Arts of Asia (an
“anthropological” collection of mostly traditional and historical Asian
artefacts and antiquities). It had been Chuang’s observation that, statistically,
Museum attendance was comparatively lower in regard to both the Asian
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