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The Lolita Complex: - Scholarly Commons Home

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in May 2007. That event became my foray into the academic arena,<br />

establishing my name in connection to the topic of the Japanese <strong>Lolita</strong>, as it<br />

became the catalyst for the exhibition I curated at Auckland War Memorial<br />

Museum, titled Loli-Pop, which ran from September to November, 2007.<br />

By 2007, the <strong>Lolita</strong> subculture had finally began to make small waves in<br />

terms of media awareness, with newspaper articles appearing worldwide.<br />

However, mainstream society outside Japan was still waiting to catch on.<br />

<strong>The</strong> question remains whether it ever really has in any significant way.<br />

Besides known communities in some of the US states, and pockets of<br />

Europe, such as Germany and France, the subculture has never really<br />

operated on the same scale in many countries as it has in Japan. In a sense,<br />

this has been a positive thing as it means that the minority groups around<br />

the world have tended to adhere to the authentic Japanese proclivities,<br />

deviating little from the movement’s intentions.<br />

In New Zealand, it was the Loli-Pop exhibition that began public<br />

discourse. It came about when Bevan Chuang, who was employed at<br />

Auckland Museum in an administrative position, was planning to propose a<br />

show on a contemporary, Asian theme to coincide with and promote the<br />

opening of a new permanent gallery display titled Arts of Asia (an<br />

“anthropological” collection of mostly traditional and historical Asian<br />

artefacts and antiquities). It had been Chuang’s observation that, statistically,<br />

Museum attendance was comparatively lower in regard to both the Asian<br />

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