Maidens sans Frontiers
Maidens Sans Frontiers
Maidens Sans Frontiers: Japanese Girl Culture in Australia is an exhibition that both celebrates and investigates contemporary Japanese girl culture as it manifests in Australia. Showcasing cosplay costumes, fashion items, photographs, video, postcards, books, manga, collectibles, Maidens Sans Frontiers is a collection of artefacts that inspired our co-authored academic book Maidens Sans Frontiers: Girl Culture in Japan and Beyond (Routledge forthcoming). In addition to the artefacts themselves, this exhibition will feature expert commentary.
Maidens Sans Frontiers: Japanese Girl Culture in Australia is a touring exhibition that is designed for general public consumption teamed with several targeted events enabling audiences to engage with the exhibition and research in more depth. The exhibition will have both online and in-person components.
Touring Exhibition
Our goal is to bring together diverse visual, physical and digital artefacts to build public appreciation and understanding of shōjo culture’s international appeal. These items come from our personal collections and will be framed by heartfelt commentary displayed with the items and online which will interpret the objects’ personal and academic connections to show how academic research often becomes an all-consuming passion, and how fandom and creative pursuits can also translate into academic research in Japanese studies.
The exhibition will offer a series of workshops to local school students, university students, and community members about Japanese popular culture:
“Reading shōjo manga in Australia” (Leader: Lucy Fraser) (completed at UQ in October)
“Japanese girl art in Australia” (Leader: Emily Wakeling)
“Crafting Flowers” (Leader: Kazuyo Kashiwagi) (completed at UQ in October)
“Cosplaying shōjo characters” (Leader: TaeYon Kim) (online/zoom event)
“Girl’s Day and Boy’s Day” (Leader: Emerald L King) (high school workshop)
This exhibition is supported by funding from the Japan Foundation, University of Tasmania and The University of Queensland. It is also generously hosted by the University of Queensland Central Library and Duhig Tower and the UTAS Morris Miller library.
Maidens Sans Frontiers brings together the collections of three academics working on and with Japanese girl culture – Dr Lucy Fraser (UQ), Dr Megan Rose (UNSW) and Dr Emerald L King (UTAS).
Our work seeks to explore and interpret Japanese girls’ culture ‘sans frontiers’ across borders – in this instance Australia. Japanese popular culture has a long history of popularity in Australia, but little attention has been paid to the popularity of girls’ culture which is often dismissed as frivolous or ‘not serious’ enough or ‘not real’ comics/narratives/computer games/hobbies.
We are pleased to be able to take over library spaces as so many of the ‘girls’ we work on are reading girls.
The UQ version of this exhibition featured holdings from the UQ library including book plates from Japanese artist Takehisa Yumeji (1884-1934) whose work continues to have an influence on shojo design and fashion.
For this iteration, there is an emphasis on costume and fashion We are thrilled to showcase the collections of local wearers of lolita street fashion as well as the cosplay costumes of Emerald King.
