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.

Morris Miller – Reflection

April 6 2022

I want to write that it’s been a month since Maidens Sans Frontiers closed, but it’s actually only been three weeks since our final event with cosplayer TaeYeon Kim and WCS Australia.

Bringing Maidens to Hobart was not only a calculated decision to bring Japan Foundation Funding to regional Australia, but also something of a homecoming for me as it coincided with my return to University of Tasmania as an academic.

Much of what is on display is personal to Lucy, Megan, and me: Lucy’s books. Megan’s dolls. The postcards that have lined my walls since 2013 – the postcards that ironically are still in a box in the corner of my new office as I haven’t had the time or the energy to put them up.

Where the Duhig Tower exhibition had three video screens that we could screen cosplay images and fashion films, the Morris Miller exhibition had space for mannequins which allowed us to display the Rose of Versailles costumes for the whole exhibition. I was also able to draw on the local lolita community to display a frilly sweet out fit from Angelic Pretty and a dark gothy outfit from Alice and the Pirates.

I also love the contrast of the two display spaces – Duhig Tower with it’s dark, sandstone walls and it’s links to an imagined Europe; Morris Miller with it’s bright, open fouyer that was updated in 2005 to create a retro futuristic space from the 1960s brutalist design so common on the campuses of Australasian universities.

The thing I am most pleased about this exhibition was that I was allowed to pull a number of books from the library shelves to have on display – a mix of girl studies critique, novels, and shojo manga studies. A display that was quickly dismantled by guests at the opening and by students borrowing books over the coming weeks.

Books?! In a library?! Who would have ever thought it possible

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Crafting Fantasty (2022)

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Maidens sans Frontiers - UQ (2021)