Rhiannon Paget, Curator of Asian Art, The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art
In 2024, Hello Kitty celebrated her Golden Jubilee as the reigning Queen of Japanese Popular Culture for 50 years. Since then, Japan’s reputation as a nation of cat lovers has only grown through the popularity of cat temples, cat islands, cat cafés and innumerable feline celebrities. However, Japan’s ailurophilia has a much longer history, vividly depicted in centuries of Japanese art and visual culture. Depending on the context, they may elevate the mood, invite good fortune, prompt the viewer to meditate on a tale or even point to an unseen world of magic and supernatural happenings.
Rhiannon Paget is the Curator of Asian Art at The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, Florida State University. She has published research on paintings, textiles, popular visual culture, and especially woodblock prints. Her most recent books are Divine Felines: The Cat in Japanese Art (2023), Japanese Prints in Transition: From the Floating World to the Modern World (2023), and Saitō Kiyoshi: Graphic Awakening (2021). Co-authored titles include Hiroshige: Nature and the City (2023) and Hiroshige & Eisen: The Sixty-Nine Stations along the Kisokaidō (2017, winner of the 2018 IFPDA Book Award). She has curated numerous exhibitions, including Mountains of the Mind: Scholars’ Rocks in China and Beyond (2023–24), and Saitō Kiyoshi: Graphic Awakening (2021). Prior to joining The Ringling, she was the A. W. Mellon Fellow for Japanese Art, where she curated the exhibition A Century of Japanese Prints (2017) and co-curated Conflicts of Interest: Art and War in Modern Japan (2016–17). She holds a PhD from the University of Sydney, Australia.
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